725646 - Remove support for the hspace/vspace attributes on table

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, task)

Description

[:Ms2ger (he/him; ⌚ UTC+1/+2)]

Attachment: Patch v1

These attributes are not supported at all in IE and Opera, and only in quirks mode in Gecko. Chrome supports them in all modes.

I think we can get away with removing support entirely.

Comment 1

[Kyle Huey (Exited; not receiving bugmail, old account, do not use)]

Is it possible to get a more data driven answer than "we think we can get away with it"?

Comment 2

[John Jensen]

This seems to be a perfect question to direct to Blekko, who have a neat "grep the web" tool we can use. Essentially we would ask them "what percentage of <table> tags use hspace or vspace? Coincidentally there is a brownbag discussion being held today with them and I will follow up to see if this is possible.

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Comment on attachment 595720 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch v1

r=me on the code changes, but I'd love to see the data here.  Does IE really not support this even in their compat quirks mode?

Comment 4

[:Ms2ger (he/him; ⌚ UTC+1/+2)]

My IE8 on WinXP doesn't seem to support it, with or without doctype.

Comment 5

[:Ms2ger (he/him; ⌚ UTC+1/+2)]

John, do you know when we could get the data?

Comment 6

[John Jensen]

I've followed up with them and will update this ASAP.

Comment 7

[:Ms2ger (he/him; ⌚ UTC+1/+2)]

Thanks!

Comment 8

[:Ms2ger (he/him; ⌚ UTC+1/+2)]

John, you would get to me ASAP over a month ago. Do you have an ETA? I'd rather not wait indefinitely to finish this bug.

Comment 9

[John Jensen]

Hi Gerv,

Sorry, perhaps some miscommunication here. I saw you were cc'd on the emails from Blekko and thought that was sufficient. I'll dive back into that thread and get it sorted out.

Comment 10

[John Jensen]

Hi Ms2ger,

Blekko poated the results of two crawls here:

http://blekko.com/webgrep?page=view&id=2bf3a3f2189ce6142e124c5dc78a00b8
http://blekko.com/webgrep?page=view&id=736e28936d117ea69349c0e92f7b5994

Comment 11

[:Ms2ger (he/him; ⌚ UTC+1/+2)]

So, what's the conclusion here?

Comment 12

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

What does the data look like?

Comment 13

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

Someone needs to draw conclusions from comment 10 here.  It's a big number, but not clear to me how big.  And it wouldn't surprise me if most (or even nearly all) of the values were 0, which I think should be the default for both.

Comment 14

[Simon Pieters [:zcorpan]]

One of the crawls looked for non-zero values if I understand the grep correctly. So looking at just number of URLs:

hspace 3.16M of which 2.21M (70%) have non-zero value
vspace 3.29M of which 2.28M (69%) have non-zero value

One thing I wonder is, in <table[^>]*hspace\s*=\s*['"]?[ ^0][^>]*> there's a space before the ^, is that intended to be there? Also, since the " or ' before it is optional in the regexp, it could instead match the [^0], so these results might be bogus.

I did a different search, data set 18/06/2013 from http://webdevdata.org/ (53,000 pages):

$ grep -riE "<table\s[^>]*(v|h)space\s*=\s*[\"']?[1-9]" . > ~/Desktop/vhspace.txt
$ wc -l ~/Desktop/vhspace.txt 
      13 /Users/zcorpan/Desktop/vhspace.txt

The matches were from 9 different sites. So it's 0.017% of the sites in this data set that use non-zero vspace/hspace.

Comment 15

[Simon Pieters [:zcorpan]]

Analysis of visual impact of dropping vspace/hspace on those 9 pages:

stihi.ru - an image would get rid of 10px vertical spacing and two items in the footer would lose 3px spacing. Seems acceptable.

seiya-saiga.com - no visible difference.

www.clipmoon.com - the column widths differ by a few pixels. Seems acceptable.

proza.ru - same or very similar site as stihi.ru

gossiplankanews.com - no visible difference.

gossiplanka.lk - same site as above.

www.localharvest.org - header would lose 4px vertical spacing. Seems acceptable.

akipress.org - no visible difference.

paparasinewslanka.com - 404

Comment 16

[Simon Pieters [:zcorpan]]

I filed bugs on Blink and WebKit:
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=277080
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=120133

Comment 17

[Simon Pieters [:zcorpan]]

Spec bug:
https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=23039

Comment 18

[:Ms2ger (he/him; ⌚ UTC+1/+2)]

Chrome is doing this, fwiw.

Comment 19

[:Ms2ger (he/him; ⌚ UTC+1/+2)]

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink-dev/1ZjuiWEj-Ww

Comment 20

[j.j.]

The Blink bug is fixed since February 2015
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=277080

Comment 21

[:Ms2ger (he/him; ⌚ UTC+1/+2)]

https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/13

Comment 22

[Kohei Yoshino]

Posted the site compatibility doc: https://www.fxsitecompat.com/en-US/docs/2015/hspace-vspace-attributes-on-table-will-no-longer-be-supported/

Comment 23

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The bug assignee is inactive on Bugzilla, so the assignee is being reset.

Comment 24

[Simon Pieters [:zcorpan]]

The relevant tests pass, so this seems fixed: https://wpt.fyi/results/html/rendering/non-replaced-elements/tables?label=master&label=experimental&aligned&q=vspace