Repeating table caption after page break

Question

When printing an HTML table, you can use CSS to force the table's header row to display again after the page break. This style:

@media print {
   thead { display: table-header-group; }
}

Results in:

Caption
-------------
Col1  | Col2
-------------
Data1 | Data2
Data3 | Data4

--Page Break--

Col1  | Col2
-------------
Data5 | Data6

Is there a way to also repeat the table caption after the page break? I would think you could do something like caption { display: table-caption-group; }, but this doesn't exist. The solution would need to work in IE9.

Answer 1

I’m afraid there is no way to achieve that. In principle, you can set caption { display: table-caption-group; }, but by the specs, “If a table contains multiple elements with 'display: table-header-group', only the first is rendered as a header; the others are treated as if they had 'display: table-row-group'.” So you would not be able to make both the thead and the caption repeat. Besides, IE 9 does not get even let you repeat caption alone (Firefox does).

The workaround is to turn the caption element to a table row that is part of the thead element. E.g., for a two-column table:

<table>
<thead>
<tr><th colspan=2>Caption
<tr><th>Header cell <th>Another header cell
</thead>