Comment 10 for bug 235006

Boris, could you please elaborate on what you mean by "the borders
belong to the table, not the cells"? Do you mean this is how it is currently
treated in Gecko's architecture, or is there some wording in the CSS spec to
that effect (I couldn't find any)? In either case it's perhaps a bit
counterintuitive because the borders are explicitly set on the *cells* in the
CSS ( td {border:1px dotted blue;} ), not any other part of the table.

I can see though that this is more complicated than it appears at first, and
brings up issues that may not have been thought of when the spec was defined.
For instance, the border-collapse:collapse scheme says that borders that meet
are combined in a very clearly defined way. But when you scroll the <tbody>,
all of a sudden you are separating certain borders (i.e. those that meet between
the <thead>/<tfoot> and <tbody>). Or actually you are creating a situation in
which borders may be meeting at some times and not meeting at others. Take the
top of a <tbody> with overflow:auto where it meets the bottom of the <thead>:
when scrolled to the top the borders meet (and you would expect the
collapsing-borders rules to apply) but when scrolled down a way those borders no
longer meet and are effectively separated.

While it may seem obvious from the viewpoint of a web developer who wants it to
"just work", these kinds of details that implementors have to deal with are not
nearly so obvious.

Perhaps this should be brought up to the CSS WG.