Comment 385 for bug 353877

David, you should know by now that "deprecated presentational attributes requested" are fighting words in the context of this thread, but I'd like to discuss bug 371323 that you mentioned, instead.

I understand that as a volunteer contributor to an open-source project, the type of work that you are interested in doing does affect what makes it into the end product. On that note, I read the spec in the proposed selectors4 draft for :column(). I'd like to encourage you to pursue that implementation. I think that doing so will help both of us. It seems to be defined well enough from a CSS perspective to let you write it in a way that is compatible with the rest of your CSS engine. Once you have a :-moz-column() pseudo-class selector in place, couldn't you just add this set of rules to the internal Mozilla default stylesheet?

:-moz-column(col[align="left" ]) { text-align: left ; }
:-moz-column(col[align="center" ]) { text-align: center ; }
:-moz-column(col[align="right" ]) { text-align: right ; }
:-moz-column(col[align="justify" ]) { text-align: justify; }
:-moz-column(col[valign="top" ]) { vertical-align: top ; }
:-moz-column(col[valign="middle" ]) { vertical-align: middle ; }
:-moz-column(col[valign="bottom" ]) { vertical-align: bottom ; }
:-moz-column(col[valign="baseline"]) { vertical-align: baseline; }

Similar rules could be added for align/valign in colgroups:
:-moz-column(colgroup[align="left"] > col) { text-align: left; }

The downsides I see with this approach:
- it wouldn't cover align="char" and charoff
- I don't know if it'd be possible to handle cols with span defined
- assigning styles directly to the <col> element (e.g. col.style.textAlign = "center") wouldn't update the style

The upsides to this approach:
- it'd probably be good enough for most of the people in this thread
- it would be fairly harmless to add at that point (via the default stylesheet)
- it would finally bring an end to 13 years of fighting over this damn bug.

So please, godspeed on bug 371323. :)