HTML Tables

In HTML, the original purpose of tables was to present tabular data. Although they are still used for this purpose today, many web designers tended to use tables for advanced layouts. This is probably due to the restrictions that HTML has on layout capabilities - it wasn't really designed as a layout language.

Anyway, whether you use tables for presenting tabular data, or for page layouts, you will use the same HTML tags.

Basic table tags

In HTML, you create tables using the table tag, in conjunction with the tr and td tags. Although there are other tags for creating tables, these are the basics for creating a table in HTML.

HTML Code:

<table border="1">
<tr>
<td>Table cell 1</td><td>Table cell 2</td>
</tr>
</table>

This results in:

You'll notice that we added a border attribute to the table tag. This particular attribute allows us to specify how thick the border will be. If we don't want a border we can specify 0 (zero). Other common attributes you can use with your table tag include width, width, cellspacing and cellpadding.

You can also add attributes to the tr and td tags. For example, you can specify the width of each table cell.

Widths can be specified in either pixels or percentages. Specifying the width in pixels allows you to specify an exact width. Percentages allows the table to "grow" or "shrink" depending on what else is on the page and how wide the browser is.

HTML Code:

<table border="1" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="5" width="100%">
<tr>
<td width="20%">Table cell 1</td><td>Table cell 2</td>
</tr>
</table>

This results in:

Table Headers

Many tables, particularly those with tabular data, have a header row or column. In HTML, you can use the th tag.

Most browsers display table headers in bold and center-aligned.

HTML Code:

<table border="1" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="5" width="100%">
<tr>
<th>Table header</th>
<th>Table header</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="20%">Table cell 1</td><td>Table cell 2</td>
</tr>
</table>

This results in:

Colspan

You can use the colspan attribute to make a cell span multiple columns.

HTML Code:

<table border="1" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="5" width="100%">
<tr>
<th colspan="2">Table header</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="20%">Table cell 1</td><td>Table cell 2</td>
</tr>
</table>

This results in:

Rowspan

Rowspan is for rows just what colspan is for columns (rowspan allows a cell to span multiple rows).

HTML Code:

<table border="1" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="5" width="100%">
<tr>
<th rowspan="2">Table header</th><td>Table cell 1
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Table cell 2</td>
</tr>
</table>

This results in:

Color

You can apply color to your table using CSS. Actually, you can apply any applicable CSS property to your table - not just colors. For example, you can use CSS to apply width, padding, margin, etc

HTML Code:

<table border="1" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="5" width="100%">
<tr>
<th style="color:blue;background-color:yellow;" rowspan="2">Table header</th><td>Table cell 1
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Table cell 2</td>
</tr>
</table>

This results in:

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