I am referring to the usage a table for showing tabular data, eg: a spreadsheet, focusing on numbers, that I feel and see in UX that should be right aligned, properly formatted (with same number of decimals) to facilitate sums. For numbers this looks like a borderline case between semantics and formatting, for other kind of data types like dates choosing an alignment is more arbitrary.
I of course agree in using css when possible but css is not always supported or enabled and I see reasons to use align='right' since it gives decent default for when there is no support for css. This happens for example in my version of Lynx or when a browser user disables css to print.
Speculation: perhaps a more semantic attribute like <td number='true'> could do the work also if seen how problematic are
<input type='number'>
in HTML5 in respect to localization I would just expect from it to align on right.
I remember also at some point in time was difficult to override align attribute with css (and I remember css designers asking me to remove it from HTML) but this seems not true (anymore?) now
Am I missing something ? I am personally generating align='right' for numbers in my html.
My main question is: is there any reason except the fact that is deprecated to not use ALIGN='right' for properly formatted numbers on an HTML TD ?
Thanks.
You sound like you know what you are talking about, so I would say just use align=right. Of course just be aware of the disadvantages of this: