>From: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
>
> Defining a new attribute (with a five to ten year
> lead time for implementation) as a workaround does
> not make sense to me, as a way of working round the
> apparent ten year lead time for implementing 
> separation of styling properly.

I Agree.

1) By the time this standard is introduced, browsers will have had a long lead time to introduce CSS support. Further, most browsers lacking CSS support have died out.

2) It is not terribly difficult to divine a table tag abused as a layout element from a table representing a table. Opera's "Small Screen Rendering" technology is today's finest example of an algorithm making such a determination, but any browser can do it. Sure browsers may not bother - but those same browsers would never bother to support this new attribute either, making their laziness moot.

3) Corporate sites with long-standing HTML layout tables *could* easily have the attribute added. But generally little easy changes do not happen at large corporations; they get lost in a bin of minor complaints, and are addressed only when major change (like a move to CSS) is brought to a section of the site.

Then there are dormant sites with layout tables that will never receive this attention, and GUIs that generate layout tables that will remain ignorant to this attribute as they are CSS.

The majority of sites would never have use for it.

-Chris "SoopahMan" Moschini
http://hiveminds.info/ 
http://soopahman.com/