TablesNG Resolves 72 Chromium Bugs for Better Interoperability
TablesNG launches in Chromium 91, and fixes a ton of bugs that have been a part of the web platform for years. These updates will improve browser compatibility as a part of the #Compat2021 effort, and improve using tables on the web platform overall. Some of the most-starred issues include position: sticky in rows, subpixel geometry, and proper border-collapsing.
TablesNG is a multi-year effort, led by Chrome developer Aleks Totic, to completely re-architect how tables are rendered on the web. Tables are a particular area of friction in web development, in part because of their history.
Tables were added to HTML in 1994, then used as the primary method to create complex page layouts for many years. They are still found all over the web, although modern usage is generally to display tabular data. However, there are big differences in table behavior across browsers, many of which came about due to the tables specification being incomplete and lacking detail. Tables were also implemented in browsers before many CSS features: orthogonal writing modes, position:relative, box-sizing, flexbox containers, and more. So support for many of these features was inconsistent.
The new spec, CSS Table Module Level 3, was written after Edge reimplemented tables in 2018. TablesNG is a re-architecture effort that aims to not only follow this new specification, but to also fix a lot of the inconsistencies in tables along the way. Some of the most visible changes that have come out of this are:
