Re: LYNX-DEV Tables in Lynx ...

[David Woolley]

> Actually it is much harder than it looks.  Mainly because people abuse
> table tags more than most other HTML, e.g. what do you do if there are
> only 5 <TD> entries on one line and 7 in the next?  What about missing
> </TABLE> tags?  Or even missing </TR> (<TR><TD>...<TD>...[implied
> /TR]<TR><TD> is a very common abuse).  Another fun thing is <A...> in one

The HTML specs (4.0 at least) are quite clear on the missing TD/TH's;
sufficient TDs are appended to make all rows the same length - this is not
error recovery, it is normal behaviour.   I seem to remember that some
versions of Netscape need the closing tags on rows or cells, although,
as pointed out elsewhere, they are optional according to the DTD.

The real nasty is rowspan.  Once you have rowspan, there must be no
matching TD in the subsequent rows of that spanned column, so you have
to track open row spans.