HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
16
Building a Simple Table
Modern web standards maintain that HTML tables should only be used to contain tabular
data. And what's tabular data? Why content that goes in tables, of course! Don't you love cir-
cular definitions?
Tables on the Web allow information to be displayed in a grid. The rows and columns of the
table can be labeled and styled to help make the content easy to understand at a glance. As you
might expect with a highly structured page element like a table, numerous tags are involved,
which must be precisely placed to create the proper code configuration. In this lesson, you
learn how HTML tables are constructed and how to work the various table elements — rows,
columns, and cells — to create a basic table.
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To create the most basic HTML table, you need three different tags:
: The
<table>
tag is the outermost element that contains the other two tags
and all content.
➤
➤
<table>
➤
➤
: The
<tr>
tag defines the
table row
and holds the final element.
<tr>
: The
<td>
tag stands for
table data
; the complete
<td>
tag is also known as a
table cell. Any content that is displayed in the table is placed between the opening and
closing
<td>
tag pair.
➤
➤
<td>
You'll notice that there is no tag related directly to the columns. With a basic HTML table, the
number of
<td>
tags in a table row determines the number of columns. For example, the fol-
lowing table has three columns and two rows:
<table>
<tr>
<td>First name</td>
<td>Last name</td>
<td>Extension</td>
</tr>
<tr>
