ENH: GH17054: read_html() handles rowspan/colspan and infers headers

doc/source/whatsnew/v0.21.0.txt

@@ -125,6 +125,7 @@ Other Enhancements
 - :func:`DataFrame.select_dtypes` now accepts scalar values for include/exclude as well as list-like. (:issue:`16855`)
 - :func:`date_range` now accepts 'YS' in addition to 'AS' as an alias for start of year (:issue:`9313`)
 - :func:`date_range` now accepts 'Y' in addition to 'A' as an alias for end of year (:issue:`9313`)
+- :func:`read_html` handles colspan and rowspan arguments and attempts to infer a header if the header is not explicitly specified (:issue:`17054`)
 - Integration with `Apache Parquet <https://parquet.apache.org/>`__, including a new top-level :func:`read_parquet` and :func:`DataFrame.to_parquet` method, see :ref:`here <io.parquet>`. (:issue:`15838`, :issue:`17438`)
 - :func:`DataFrame.add_prefix` and :func:`DataFrame.add_suffix` now accept strings containing the '%' character. (:issue:`17151`)
 - `read_*` methods can now infer compression from non-string paths, such as ``pathlib.Path`` objects (:issue:`17206`).