safari_vs_tfoot

Posted 2003-01-07 @ 22:41:45

Mark Pilgrim notes that Safari incorrectly renders the TFOOT element between the THEAD & TBODY elements (as it appears in the document's markup), citing my CSS Filters table as an example of this behavior. This surprised me, because in my experience, Safari rendered the table nearly identically to Gecko-based browsers.

I confirmed that Safari was handling the document correctly, then proceeded to run Safari through some of the test pages for hiding CSS. When I returned to the table, sure enough, the TFOOT was misplaced. Reloading the document produced erratic results, with the TFOOT's placement seeming to randomly cycle between its correct position at the bottom of the table, a point within the TBODY's content (second cell of the twelfth row), to the point Mark described, between the THEAD & the TBODY.

I built a stripped-down demo document in an attempt to track down the bug's trigger, but after rigorous testing, I've been wholly unsuccessful in my attempts to coerce Safari into rendering the test table correctly. I added a simple style sheet to the document, which demonstrates that, unlike Netscape 4.x, Safari does indeed recognize the row group elements, and tests also show that at least some of the element's DOM events fire correctly.

Curiouser & curiouser...