4.3. Inheritance Order

Alignment properties can be included with most of the table elements: COL, THEAD, TBODY, TFOOT, TR, TH and TD. When rendering cells, horizontal alignment is determined by columns in preference to rows, while for vertical alignment, the rows are more important than the columns. The following table gives the detailed precedence order for each attribute, where X > Y denotes that X takes precedence over Y:

   ALIGN, CHAR and CHAROFF:

   cells > columns > column groups > rows > row groups > default

   VALIGN, LANG, and DIR:

   cells > rows > row groups > columns > column groups > table > default

Where cells are defined by TH and TD elements; rows by TR elements; row groups by THEAD, TBODY and TFOOT elements, columns by COL elements; and column groups by COLGROUP and COL elements. Note that there is no inheritance mechanism for the CLASS attribute.

Properties defined on cells take precedence over inherited properties, but are in turn over-ridden by alignment properties on elements within cells. In the absence of an ALIGN attribute along the inheritance path, the recommended default alignment for table cell contents is ALIGN=LEFT for table data and ALIGN=CENTER for table headers. The recommended default for vertical alignment is VALIGN=MIDDLE. These defaults are chosen to match the behaviour of the widely deployed Netscape implementation.