When did colspan and rowspan become available for usage in HTML tables?

Question

A co-worker and I are curious about when colspan and rowspan became available for usage in HTML tables.

We tried Google and Wikipedia, but the answer still seems to elude us.

I thought it might have been since HTML 2, or early-to-mid-90s, but he insists it wasn't until 2000 or later....

Answer 1

RFC 1942 introduced tables in May 96, the rfc includes rowspans so this is the earliest official document implementing them.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1942

Edit - Should mention that this is a refinement for html 2.0

Answer 2

They're mentioned in versions of the HTML 4 spec as far back as 1997 at least. edit They're also in HTML 3; they seem to have been around as long as <table> itself.

Answer 3

As far as W3C is concerned, it looks like HTML 3.2, so January 1997. Both attributes are mentioned in the 3.2 spec, but I don't see them anywhere in the 2.0 spec.

If you're not strictly following W3C, the answer seems to be May 1996. See the example at the top of page 2 of RFC 1942, which adds support for tables.

Answer 4

According to this, they are defined in HTML 3.2, which is dated 14 Jan 1997. So, a long way back.

Answer 5

Well they are in HTML3: http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html3/tables.html