Aligning decimal points in HTML

Question

I have a table containing decimal numbers in one column. I\'m looking to align them in a manner similar to a word processor\'s \"decimal tab\" feature, so that all the poin

Answer 1

Thousands of years ago (or 2-3) I wrote a jQuery shim that emulates align="char" which still seems to work. It uses CSS padding and accounts for colspans, so it's moderately clever, but it's really not very pretty code (I was just starting out in javascript back then). I'd love for someone to rewrite it (and take all the credit).

In the mean time, see if this helps you: https://gist.github.com/inanimatt/f27ffd25c174e9d8a0907455395d147d

Trivia: The reason that browsers don't properly support column styles is that tables are 2D data structures and the DOM (which is what Javascript and CSS operate on, and how HTML5 is defined) is purely hierarchical and therefore can't represent both columns and rows. Instead it simply defines rows and cells, and doesn't represent columns at all.