So Much For Standards Compliant

Maybe I’m expecting too much but I would have thought that a browser that claimed to be standards compliant might actually implement the standard….  In particular I’m annoyed that Gecko doesn’t fully support HTML 4 tables (it ignores the align and valign attributes on colgroup and col elements).  IE gets it right.  To be fair, Safari also ignores them.  Oh and of course you can’t achieve the same thing via CSS since CSS styles don’t get applied either via a styles attribute or via embedded styles (rightfully so since the standard doesn’t say they should be applied).   You have to manually markup each cell in the column. Yuck..

The main reason I comment though isn’t because I terribly miss the align or valign attributes on colgroups but rather that I consider it a pretty sad state of affairs that noone can correctly implement the HTML standard and that people seem to consider it okay to claim that Mozilla is standards compliant when it can be shown that it isn’t (in more ways than just colgroups).  To their credit, the Mozilla organization don’t seem to claim this but most Mozilla advocates do.

Sigh.  What’s the point of the W3C if the stuff they come up with is practically impossible to implement?