HTML Tables
Table tags are used for displaying spreadhseet-like data neatly formatted in rows and columns. They can also be used to design page layouts by placing content into invisible rows and columns of a 'table'.
- Table -
<table> ... </table>
- Used to define a table, it contains all row and column tags along with their content. Think of it like the
body
tag, although there must always be at least one row in a table. It has some attributes to define the table layout. border="?"
- The size of the border (in pixels) surrounding the tablecellspacing="?"
- The space (in pixels) between each cell, eg. between rows or columnscellpadding="?"
- The space, or margin, between the content of a cell and its border- Table Row -
<tr> </tr>
- To start a table row, the
tr
tags must appear within thetable
tags. - Table Cell -
<td> </td>
- A table cell is where the content goes. Cells must exist within rows, where the number of cells in a row determines the number of columns in the table. Cell properties can be set using the attributes:
align="?"
- Alignment of text in the cell:left
,center
orright
(*)valign="?"
- Vertical alignment of the cell:top
,middle
orbottom
.width="?"
- Specify a fixed with of a cell, by default they will only take up as much space as they need.colspan="?"
- Column spanning allows a cell to take up more than one column, in order to match layouts of other rows. Replace?
with the number of columns to span.rowspan="?"
- Row spanning, similar to column spanning, forces a cell to occupy more than one row.nowrap
- No text in the cell will be wrapped onto the next line. Similar to thenobr
tag for paragraphs- Header Cell -
<th> </th>
- Similar to a table cell, a header cell must appear within a table row. Normally found in the first row, header cells are usually shown in bold and centered by the browser.
Example:
A simple table with three rows and two columns.
<html>
<body>
<table border="1">
<tr>
<th>Header 1</th>
<th>Header 2</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Cell A1</td>
<td>Cell B1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Cell A2</td>
<td>Cell B2</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>
See live demo of this example or open in a new window. (Note: close window or tab to return to the guide)
Example:
See another tables example with column and row spanning. Select 'view source' in your browser to view the html code.