maybe have a look at the <col> html tag. I have no idea if it's still
valid xhtml though.

zigger wrote:

See also bug 986, which requests the HTML tags COL, COLGROUP, TBODY and THEAD.

happy.melon.wiki wrote:

This functionality would be handled by <colgroup> and <col>. They are valid in HTML5, which is the future (XHMTL2.0 is dead). Also totally stale.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 986 ***

Should this be closed once TemplateStyles is deployed?

I don't think TemplateStyles is going to solve the root problem. Sure, theoretically it will give the ordinary users much more flexibility in styling their tables, but it isn't reasonable to expect that most will want to deal with full-blown CSS. Currently, the best way of achieving per-column alignment seems to be defining specific classes that should cover all possible cases: col-1-center, col-2-right, etc., and then adding them to the table header, e.g. {| class="wikitable col-3-right col-4-right". This is cumbersome, especially for larger tables, but at least it doesn't require technical knowledge from the ordinary editors.

I suggest using data-align="..." (left, center, right) in the column header. Modeled on data-sort-type="..."

See Help:Sorting. data-sort-type="..." is discussed in the section called "Forcing a column to have a particular data type":
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Sorting#Forcing_a_column_to_have_a_particular_data_type

data-sort-type="..." is placed in the column header to force a column to sort by text, number, etc..

data-align="..." (left, center, right) could be used to force a column's cells to be aligned left, right, or center.

See List of countries by intentional homicide rate:
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

The country, region, and subregion columns need their text aligned left. The rate and count columns need their data aligned right. So there are 3 text columns aligned left, and 2 data columns aligned right. By default, browsers left-align all cells, other than header cells. Header cells are center-aligned by default.

So the main editors at that table used inline CSS to align every data cell to the right. They used class=plainrowheaders to align the text in the row header cells (country names) to the left.

This table is periodically updated every year or 2 as new data comes out. The alignment CSS has to be added to all those cells again. This method is a lot of clutter, and unnecessary work.

Usually one can use tab2wiki, LibreOffice Calc, and/or the Visual Editor to update these type of tables relatively quickly. Except for the cell content alignment.

See the Visual Editor section at the bottom of Help:Table.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Table#Tables_and_the_Visual_Editor_(VE)