Table colgroups don't seem to work at all any more. Setting col style has no effect, nor does align or lang. I have checked it in Windows 98 (build id2002091014) and Mandrake Linux 9.0, and also see the problem in Netscape 7 on both platforms. This is at least since release 1.0 -- I know colgroups were working in Netscape 6. I double-checked my HTML files with MSIE 6 -- colgroups work correctly there.

This is probably bug 4510...

yep. Please understand that while column background should be painted, 'color' will have no effect. This is because in CSS, inheritance is exclusively through the element tree and <col> elements do not actually contain <td>.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 4510 ***

Bug 4510 seems only to refer to CSS int the style attribute. Colgroup also fails to work for html attributes. For example, these attributes in a col element fails to align the column to a decimal point: align="char" char="." Also the lang attribute: on my system, the second column is rendered identically to the third column, which is different from the first: <table> <colgroup> <col /> <col lang="RU" /> <col /> </colgroup> <tbody> <tr><td><span lang="RU">Росский</span></td><td>Росский</td><td>Росский</td></tr> </tbody> </table> (This probably depends on font settings) The width attribute works. The align and valign attributes don't work, but I suppose it could be argued the are really style properties.

The above Russian example will need <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-5" /> in the html head. (pardon)

See bug 915

Verfied dupe of bug 915