When a table contains the CAPTION element, Safari ignores all styling of COL and COLGROUP. How to recreate the bug: 1. Create a valid 3 column TABLE containing the CAPTION element. (Doctype HTML 4.0.1 Strict) 2. For it to be valid, CAPTION must follow immediately after the TABLE start tag. Her is a mini example: [TABLE][CAPTION]caption[/CAPTION][COL][COL][COL][TR][TD]A[TD]B[TD]C[/TABLE] 3. Add styling to the COL element. Add a width and a background color! TABLE{background:red;} COL{width:10em;background:green;} 4. >> RESULT: Safari displays the whole table in RED and ignores the COL styling. >> SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED: the columns should have been green and 10em wide. WORKAROUND (sort of): if one moves the CAPTION _after_ the COL/COLGROUP tags, then the table will be displayed correctly in Safari. However, this will make the HTML code invalid.
This is a duplicate of bug 5822. You can download a nightly build of WebKit from http://nightly.webkit.org/ and verify that the bug is fixed. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 5822 ***
I'm sorry to have wasted your (and mine) time with a solved bug. I performed a regular search for 'caption' and '<caption>' before filing this bug, and it only yielded 2 findings, none of which included - and still not include - bug 5822. It turns out that to find bug 5822, I would have had to open the Advanced Search page _and_ turn on the option to search for status VERIFIED bugs ... I hope those that govern the Bugzilla take note ...