w3c / w3c/csswg-drafts

make break-inside behavior explicit for table elements such as <tbody>

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css-break-4 css-tables-3
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Description

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/page.html#page-break-props

Currently:

User Agents must apply these properties to block-level elements in the normal flow of the root element. User agents may also apply these properties to other elements, e.g., 'table-row' elements

Although, the specs say that user agents may also apply these properties on elements such as tbody, the word "may" plays its role and the behaviour is not uniform across implementations. This creates some sub-optimal experiences as in order to correctly paginate a table at the tbody element (so headers repeat as expected) the workaround is to add a display:block or display:inline-table style which in turn resets a number of other formatting rules.

See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27753255/page-break-not-working-with-tbody-issue/27754912#27754912 and https://forum.jsreport.net/topic/1361/page-breaks-in-chrome-pdf-not-appearing-as-expected for examples of why this current behaviour is problematic

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with the CSS 2.1 page-break properties section linked in the issue, then review the examples showing inconsistent tbody pagination behavior. Define explicit behavior for table elements such as tbody, with wording that resolves the implementation ambiguity without requiring display overrides.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
css
Domain
documentation
Issue type
Documentation
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
30/100

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