We recently upgraded our server to ww_version 2.17 from 2.12 and have noticed that HTML tables are rendered without vertical and horizontal bars to separate the cells (see example image below). Can this be fixed for all problems that have HTML tables using CSS, and, if so, what file(s) need to be edited and what should the edits be? (Question of lesser import: Is anyone else experiencing this, or is it just our local configuration?) Thanks in advance!
Answering your less important question, I see the same thing on a fresh install.
This seems to vary with the browser. In Firefox I see the table lines, but I do not in Google Chrome.
I believe this may be a larger PG issue that we are going to need to sort out. PG uses lots of deprecated table attributes for styling. In this case PG uses the "border" attribute. That is deprecated, and it is only a matter of time until all browsers stop honoring that attribute. It may be that Google Chrome has already done so, and that Firefox still is honoring it for now. PG needs to be updated to stop using those things, and to instead use css which is the new (by new I mean new for 10 years or so) way of doing this.
So it seems that the issue is not that Chrome does not honor the border attribute. Doing some testing I see that it still does. However, bootstrap sets the border for all tables to "0 solid" and the css overrides that attribute. Apparently I knew about this and I added the "border: revert" css to the style in problem.css to counteract that. Firefox honors that, but it seems that Chrome does not.
Soon the code in PG needs to be modified to output tables with the appropriate css class with css style in problem.css (really problem.scss). It is not necessary to wrap tables in a div. You can put the class directly on the table. Although that depends on what is needed. For borders the table can directly have the style. For responsive tables a containing div will be needed.
Thanks, Glenn. In the meantime, is there something that could be changed course-wide or site-wide to get internal borders back? Just curious. The extra spacing certainly works but is not what I consider ideal. Thanks in advance!
That particular problem file loads PGcourse.pl, so there is a non-invasive way to work around the issue. In your PGcourse.pl file (in the templates/macros/ folder; create one if there isn't one yet) you could redefine the macro(s) from PGbasicmacros that are at fault here. You could try redefining sub begintable (https://github.com/openwebwork/pg/blob/main/macros/PGbasicmacros.pl#L2737) so that where it currently uses BORDER='1', it would instead have
style="border: 1px solid black;"
or something like that.
This would not affect any repository files so it would not complicate things with your next upgrade. But also it would only help for exercises that load PGcourse.pl, and load it after PGbasicmacros.pl. And this is nothing to worry about but your apache error log would probably start accruing entries about this subroutine being redefined.
You could also make the changes in my pull request https://github.com/openwebwork/pg/pull/723 that addresses this issue. Although that would be a bit more invasive, and would complicate your next upgrade slightly.