“Start tag in table body” message for <thead><th></th></thead> is confusing

see screenshot

html code:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="">
<head>
<title>Test</title>
</head>
<body>
<p></p>
<table>
    <thead>
        <th></th>
    </thead>
</table>
</body>
</html>

Agreed that error message is confusing.

I’m inclined to think it should just be changed to “th start tag not within tr element”.

But to be clear one thing: the “in table body” in that error message does not mean “in the tbody element”.

If you go to https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/parsing.html#parsing-main-intable and then scroll to the part which says, “A start tag whose tag name is one of: "tbody", "tfoot", "thead"”, you’ll notice it then says, “switch the insertion mode to "in table body"”.

That is, it says the parser must switch into the "in table body" insertion mode even though it actually could be within a thead or tfoot element — not just within a tbody element.

And then if you go to https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/parsing.html#parsing-main-intbody and see the part that says, “A start tag whose tag name is one of: "th", "td"”, that’s the part of the spec that this error message corresponds to.

oh thx. fixed the lint error now that i know what it is. will leave issue open if there's interest in fixing the message. otherwise feel free to close this.

@sideshowbarker

@sideshowbarker, team, could someone unassign me from this? Seems the assignment got carried over but I’m not the best person to handle this in this repo 🙂

@sideshowbarker, team, could someone unassign me from this? Seems the assignment got carried over but I’m not the best person to handle this in this repo 🙂

Yup, done

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“Start tag in table body” message for <thead><th></th></thead> is confusing #102

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“Start tag in table body” message for <thead><th></th></thead> is confusing #102

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sideshowbarker commented on Dec 23, 2020

kaizhu256 commented on Dec 23, 2020

j9t commented on Jan 14, 2026

sideshowbarker commented on Jan 15, 2026

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