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In This Article: • Tables 101: Reviewing The Basics • HTML Table Tags • Two Examples Print this story Send as e-mail Tables are one of the most common (and commonly misunderstood) tools of basic HTML. Bruce Stewart walks you through the fundamentals of tables, their tags, and their attributes. By Bruce Stewart, WebTools (11/12/98) Introduction To Tables Tables are one of the most common and useful constructs used in Web design. Since early versions of HTML had few page-layout controls, tables emerged as a popular way to exert some control over how objects were displayed in the browser window. Although originally intended as a mechanism for displaying tabular data, tables are commonly used to achieve other typographical effects, such as establishing margins or creating multiple columns of text. While CSS offers even more control over page-layout issues, tables aren't going away anytime soon. Here's a quick refresher on how to create HTML tables, including an explanation of all the related tags, some common applications, and some table tips. Definition Of HTML tables HTML tables have been a favorite Web design tool since they were introduced as an extension to HTML back in Netscape Navigator 1.1. They made it into the formal HTML specification in HTML 3.2. The table tags let designers specify rows, columns, and cells of tables, as well as specify headers, control how or if borders are displayed, and group columns together. It's fairly straightforward to use these tags to display tabular data, such as spreadsheets, in Web pages. Main Uses Of Tables Web designers quickly saw the power of tables, not so much for their original intended use, but more as a means of having greater control over how images and text are displayed by browsers. One of the most vexing issues for designers working on the Web has always been how to get precise control over page layout, something the original design of HTML didn't intend to provide. By creatively using tables -- usually not including borders and sometimes nesting tables within other tables -- a variety of interesting effects can be achieved. A common way to have a page display with margins is to create a three-column borderless table with a width of 100 percent, and put the text in the middle column, using the empty first and third columns as margin space. This gives the designer a mechanism to define exact margin sizes, by specifying the width of the margin columns in pixels. Another common use for tables is in the laying out of images alongside text. This is how newsletter and magazine columns and photos are achieved on the Web -- with the text laid out in one table cell and the photos and captions placed in another. Next, we'll look at the HTML tags used to create tables. Bruce Stewart is a telecommunications consultant and technical writer. His articles have appeared on The Site, Web Review, and ZDNet. [HTML Table Tags>>>] Page 1 of 3

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