1. That kind of takes away from the convenience of using the “capitalize” style. It would be easier to simply capitalize the desired words. Of course, one could write server-side code to automatically wrap words such as “the” and “in” in a span tag if the word is not the first word in the capitalized span, but it is likely to produce the occasional inappropriate non-capitalization and again doesn’t seem worth the effor. I think first-letter capitalization is best handled manually.

2. The risk of using ems to scale the fixed column width is that this could force horizontal scrolling in cases where it wouldn’t happen if the webmaster would simply let the browser find the optimum column widths.

Now what I’d really like is for CSS to let me define which columns are “greedy” and which are “generous.”

1. No, capitalize doesn’t handle words like “in” and “the”. The only way around it I can think of is to modify your HTML, e.g. <p><span>this will be capitalized</span> and this won’t</p>, then only apply the style to the span.

2. Just specify your widths in em or ex. The table will scale accordingly.

The issue with 4. Fixing table widths with table-layout is that if someone is using a larger font size, the text may need a wider column. This would impact accessibility for people with low vision.

While it is true that the site visitor can override these behaviors with most modern browsers, most site visitors do not have the expertise to do so, or may prefer simply to go to a friendlier Web site.

That said, I concur with your reading of “We have found these properties to truly be useful. Hopefully they become less rare.”.. It’s much more productive to read those posts in that way, since we can’t really know what was intended!

Thanks for the article, :)

Best wishes,
-Ben

It can be very useful when your design department makes last-minute capitalization changes

I was taught that plain English capitalisation should always be used with changes in case added with CSS so I am surprised that this is so rare. If anyone ever supplied my large quantities of anything else then it was policy at an old job to send it back.