Building Tables - HTML5 with CSS3 - page 223

Required Attributes
There are no required attributes for the caption element.

Optional Attributes
There are no additional optional attributes for the caption element other than the global attributes.

Styling Tables with CSS
Tables, when processed by CSS, conform to a complicated set of algorithms referred to in the CSS
specification as the CSS table model . The CSS table model defines special display characteristics for each
of the elements within a table.

If you'd like to read through the CSS table model yourself, you can find it in the W3C's
CSS specification at w3.org/TR/CSS21/tables.html .

You're most familiar at this point with two possible values of the CSS display property: block and
inline . Unfortunately, tables in HTML don't fit neatly into either of these categories. Thus, a handful of
display property values exist that apply specifically to tables. The list of these property values includes:


table



inline-table

table-header-group



table-row-group



table-footer-group



table-row



table-cell



table-column



table-column-group



table-caption



As you can see from the list above, the property values map pretty closely in naming to the elements
we've introduced in this chapter. In the examples in this section, we'll be building up a data table featuring
a list of products for our favorite super hero supply store, Power Outfitters.

Styling Rows and Cells
We'll begin with the basic table shown in Listing 7-21.