epub writer: <col> should be within <colgroup> in tables

[MichaelKofler]

I tried to publish an ebook at Apple using the iTunes Producer. This program complained that <col> elements where not allowed within a table. I.e.

<table><col xxx/><col yyy/>

is wrong. I manually changed the xhtml file to

<table><colgroup><col xxx/><col yyy/> </colgroup>

and it was OK. Not sure if there is an epub standard for this.

Markdown sample to produce the table which triggers this error:

---------------- ---------------------------------------------
**row1**         bla

**row2**         bla bla
---------------------------------------------------------------

[jgm]

As far as I can see, the output pandoc produces is valid xhtml. There is no requirement that col elements be nested inside a colgroup. I've verified this by validating pandoc's output at http://validator.w3.org/check. If this is wrong, please supply evidence that the xhtml spec requires col elements to be inside colgroup. Otherwise, it seems to me that this is a bug in iTunes Producer, not pandoc.

[MichaelKofler]

I just re-read the xhtml specification. You are of course right. I'll try to complain at Apple ...

[omerida]

Just wanted to mention that epubcheck also complains about col elments not within a colgroup. It didn't raise that error for me when I switched to using a pipe delimited table.

[omerida]

Although, I just ran the generated html for my epub through the W3C's validator. Validator gave the following error:

XHTML element col not allowed as child of XHTML element table in this context. (Suppressing further errors from this subtree.)

For this HTML:

…s.</p><table><col style="width: 51%" /><col style="width: 47%" /><tbody><tr cl…

Details about the col element link to an HTML5 document

http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/single-page.html#the-col-element

[omerida]

Thank you! Looking forward to the next release.