594286 - tbody to officially support scrolling via: overflow:auto and display:block

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core :: Layout: Tables, enhancement)

Description

[reb]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; SunOS sun4u; rv:2.0b4) Gecko/20100819 Firefox/4.0b4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; SunOS sun4u; rv:2.0b4) Gecko/20100819

Have verified on linux/x86 firefox-4.0b4 too: not platform specific.
First trying FF4, noticed (some) tbody-overflow scrolling didn't work anymore: found bug 28800.

But appears "too-easy" fix available (see URL): Make tbody display:block and overflow:auto to scroll lives again! (Maybe I'm wrong as to "why" it works)?

Enhancement Request: Need to be able to count on this behavior preserved long-term. Fear this ALSO doomed to be termed a bug and eliminated thru a fix.

Structure still groups table rows in another element (the point of tbody). Yet does avoid display:table-row-group: End of story, excellent way to scroll for life?

Or too good to be true? Will developers say converting tbody by display:block to scroll is another door to many bugs that needs to be shut?

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
visit http://www.imaputz.com/cssStuff/bigFourVersion.html,
confirm still scrolls tbody by display:block and overflow, as desired.
Actual Results:  
Scrolling by tbody with styles "display:block" and "overflow:auto" works now, but might not be deliberate, officially supported, stable behavior.

Expected Results:  
Document that: tbody with styles "display:block" and "overflow:auto" to achieve scrolling (which works now) is correct, deliberate, officially supported, stable behavior.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

I can't tell what this bug is asking for.  

The behavior when a tbody is set to display:block is defined by the CSS2.1 spec.

The scrolling works in this case, but what doesn't work, obviously, is automatic sizing and alignment of the tbody's columns and the header/footer columns.  As long as you don't care about that, there are no issues with this approach.

Please feel free to reopen if you can make it clear what action you're actually expecting here.

Comment 2

[reb]

Confirmed auto size/alignment failure across tbody-block you noted. Sorry that is not obvious to me. You credit me with too much knowledge.

Auto size/alignment of headers with overflow/scrolling columns was removed, with no alternative in position. Take this as enh. request to get it back please. What's road-map to get it back someway/somehow (even via -moz-*...)?

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

There are no plans to reintroduce something like that at this time.

Comment 4

[tom wible]

i've had to rework my resizable scrollable fixed header table to make it work, ala imaputz, but now my 100% width is only 100% up to some maximum, while the fixed header row functions as expected.

http://toms.homeunix.net:28888/imaputz.html
scrolltable works in both ffx3 & 4, but the width is limited:-(

http://toms.homeunix.net:28888
this works perfectly in ffx3, but the scrolltable breaks in ffx4