Enhance theme_table for colgroup tag

++ I'd like to see this supported. Table data can get really interesting visually with simpler class naming among other things.

I applied the patch and I was able to affect a table with the $cols parameter, but figuring out the proper format was far from easy (even for someone who's familiar with the array structure for the $header and $rows parameters).

The documentation for the $cols parameter should be expanded and provide the same level of detail as the other two. Other than that this patch looks good to me.

Because of #3 and #4.

The $cols parameter is actually passing information about COLGROUP elements, so the name of the parameter should be $colgroups. Unlike headers and rows, column groups don't have cells, so that terminology in the code is not accurate.

Here's a patch with the following variable name changes:

$cols  => $colgroups
$col   => $colgroup
$cells => $cols
$cell  => $col

The code logic looks good and hasn't been altered.

The patch also includes a more extensive doxygen documentation with examples. I found it difficult to be clear about the parameter definition without referring to the corresponding HTML elements, so suggestions for better alternatives are welcome.

Moshe suggested outside of this issue that this colgroup functionality could be used to indicate the "active" column in sorted tables, so I took some time to investigate this feasibility. The outcome is that using colgroups to indicate the active column would come at the price of other complications:

CSS conflicts

We can use a background color on colgroup and col elements, but the background color of tr elements takes precedence and there is no way to target td elements inside of a specific columns using CSS rules.

The 'span' attribute

When generating th and tr elements, we can use tablesort_cell() to figure out if they are in the active column because we can make the assumption that the 'span' attribute is not used on sortable tables. However, this is not true for colgroup and col elements. We could figure out the active column by parsing the 'span' attributes but this is pretty messy and probably not a valuable addition to the table theme function.

subscribing

* The PHPdoc is wrapped inconsistently. Better to wrap it more or less at the same width/length. Otherwise looks good.

* Tests wouldn't hurt, although it might be difficult to test.

* Can we use colgroups anywhere in core?

* Re-rolled patch and adjusted PHPdoc wrapping.

* Tests would indeed be nice, but how do we test theme functions?

* As mentioned in #7, colgroups cannot be used for the active column of sorted tables. I looked for other places in core where this could be used but didn't find any.

Thanks for fixing the comments, and the clarifications. I've committed this to CVS HEAD. Thanks.

At May 23, 2008 I see message "committed this to CVS HEAD", but I didn't see this in Drupal 6.14.
And no changes in api: http://api.drupal.org/api/function/theme_table/6
In which HEAD does this patch committed?

Ok, in 7.x-dev I have found it. And last patch applied succesfully on Drupal 6.14.