I do not know how it happened, but my partner ended up with an HTML
table with an empty <tr></tr> element. And she attempted to sort the
table. Which did not work.
Of course, XXE told that there there was an error in the document. (Red
square in the bottom left corner.) But it remained possible to edit the
document, so this was ignored.
Also, the table looked perfectly all right: The empty <tr> simply
disappears - it is not rendered to the user. This is, of course, because
the HTML spec and/or the CSS spec says that empty table row are
collapsed when they are empty. This makes sense, I guess, for people who
browse a web page. But for authors, it can lead to confusion - like it
did for us.
Now, if you in this situation try to sort the table, you will receive an
error message which is accurate, but which appears meaningsless: The
message is that the sorting mechanism expected one of the <tr> elements
of the table to contain table cells.
The reason this message appears meaningless is that the table looks
allright - visually, there are no empty <tr> elements. It has to dawn on
you that you must inspect the source code - or else you will not
discover the error.
Could the empty <tr> be made to /not/ collapse/disappear? How about
highlighting the error with a red background or something? For instance,
I noticed that it is possible to apply the following CSS to the semantic
display mode:
tr:empty {background:red;text-align:center;}
tr:empty::before {content:"Illegal, empty table row";}
Leif Halvard Silli
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