Fine XHTML and HTML recommendations, and no response

Interval.cz is running a series on the 
 XHTML recommendation. The latest installment, XHTML — Captions, row groups, and table rows,
 covers, among other things, table groups (thead, tbody and tfoot) and the char attribute.
 Unfortunately, none of the above is handled as it should be in today’s browsers!
 The char attribute was seen by browser makers as unnecessary baggage, so
 they ignore it consistently. The same goes for scrolling inside the body of a table (tbody),
 or repeating the header (thead) and footer (tfoot)
 when printing tables that span several pages. It probably goes without saying that both were already in the
 HTML 4.01 recommendation.

Browser behavior is a fact of life and there’s nothing we can do about it. But in the flood of new features
 this or that browser throws at us, the neglect of simple basics is rather sad.