24595 - STYLE attribute values on COL element have no effect

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 915

(Core :: CSS Parsing and Computation, defect, P3)

Description

[ekrock's old account (dead)]

Using 2000011210 on WinNT 4.0 SP3.

On this page, setting COL element STYLE attribute values to visibility:visible, 
visibility:hidden, visibility:none, and background-color:red has no effect.

Looking at the COL element definition in the HTML 4.0 specification, it gets all 
the normal core, i18n, and events attributes, so shouldn't STYLE attribute 
settings on a COL have an effect on the column as they do on other elements?

If hardcoded STYLE attribute settings don't work, then presumably setting the 
STYLE attribute value CSS properties from JavaScript via the DOM won't have an 
effect either. 

This is a problem (though not a fatal one) for the Mozilla Open Source 
documentation project for xbrowser, xplatform standards-compliance checklists; 
we were hoping to enable viewers to select which platforms and which browsers 
they wanted to see displayed. This requires the ability to hide and show columns 
in a table. We were hoping to use COL elements to make this easier (and faster) 
than getting each TD element and hiding them one by one.

Workaround: set the desired CSS property value on every single TD in the column, 
one at a time. Ouch!

Will attach the file, which is a simplified testcase.

Comment 1

[ekrock's old account (dead)]

Attachment: [TESTCASE] simplified testcase showing problem

Comment 2

[ekrock's old account (dead)]

Marking [TESTCASE].

Comment 3

[Pierre Saslawsky]

Thanks for the good work in filing this bug, Eric. The testcase will be used and 
the comments won't be forgotten but I'm still closing it as dup of bug 915.


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 915 ***

Comment 4

[Christine Hoffman]

Verified dup of #915