Gavin Smith wrote:
[...]
The width specifications seem to be the most appropriate for printed
output. Often when specifying a @multitable the user wouldn't care
about the column widths. Maybe the browser can do a good job at the
layout without them. However, it could matter in some cases. I would
say there is no rush to replace this. We should check the effects on
various Texinfo documents before making any change.
If the column width specifications are not optional in the Texinfo
language (I didn't check, but I suspect they aren't), then making them
optional would be a first step. Then we could see how often users
actually wanted to specify the widths.
If I understand correctly, TeX requires table column widths to be
specified somehow, but HTML does not, so simply ignoring the specified
widths and letting the HTML renderer handle it may be appropriate here.
I think we would have to see what effects removing this has on various
manuals.
Otherwise, the CSS "width" attribute should be sufficient on the first
row of the table, provided no cells in that row use "colspan" attributes.
-- Jacob
