In this hour, you learn to arrange text and images into organized arrangements or rows and columns, called tables. You discover the three basic tags for creating tables, and many optional attributes for controlling the alignment, spacing, and appearance of tables. You also see that tables can be used together and nested within one another for an even wider variety of layout options.
(View HTML tags covered in Hour 14.)
Things to Fear(Figures 14.1 - 14.2)
The <TABLE>, <TR>, and <TD> tags are all you need to create simple tables. The <TH> tag can also be used to specify a heading.
Things to Fear II(Figures 14.3 - 14.4)
Table cells can contain both graphics and text. This table uses several table tag attributes to control borders, spacing, alignment, and cell background color. It also shows an example of a single cell spanning two columns.
Visit the Dentist(Figures 14.5 - 14.6)
Use tables whenever you want multiple columns of text and/or graphics to appear side by side. When you want wide margins, you can center a simple table that has only one cell (or you could use the techniques from Hour 15: Using Style Sheets).
By nesting one table inside another, you can create complex arrangements of text on the page. Here, a table with borders is inside a table with no borders.
The boring, conventional way to use tables is for tabular arrangements of text and numbers. But the real fun begins when you use them for arranging graphics and columns of text any which way you please. Notice that if a table is too wide for the browser window, people may have to scroll sideways to see all of it.
"Ordinarily, the size of a table and its individual cells automatically expand to fit the data you place into it. However, you can choose to control the exact size of the entire table by putting WIDTH and/or HEIGHT attributes in the <TABLE> tag. You can also control the size of each cell by putting WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes in the individual <TD> tags. The WIDTH and HEIGHT can be specified as either pixels or percentages."
Tabula Rasa
LOOK: The Site of the '90s