Comment 27 for bug 353877

I'm CCing myself and attempting to summarize this bug after running into it in
some work I was doing and spending time reading through it and the dups:

This bug is cause by a contradiction between the CSS2 spec and the HTML4 spec.

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/tables.html#q4 states that
"The following properties apply to column and column-group elements:
'border', 'background', 'width', and 'visibility'"

However, http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/tables.html#h-11.2.4 permits the
'align' attribute on COL and COLGROUP elements. If the 'align' attribute is to
be equated to the 'text-align' property, this contradicts the above secion of
CSS2.

Mozilla's current behavior complies with the CSS2 spec, however because the
'align' attribute does not inherit from COL/COLGROUP, it violates the HTML4
spec.

Restricting column inheritance to such a narrow group of properties also appears
to violate the intended purpose of the COL element, namely "The COL element
allows authors to share attributes among several columns without implying any
structural grouping." Limiting the 'attributes' to those specified by CSS2
greatly reduces the usefulness of COL/COLGROUP. Moreover, code which relies on
a wider range of columnar property inheritance is already extant, because IE
supports it.

A request for clarification to the W3C CSS working group is pending.