Trials and Tabulations

Tables have a long history in HTML. From their initial implementation in Netscape 2.0, they have become possibly the most popular HTML feature in use today. Though you'd think tables are mostly used for boring sets of numbers and dates of interest only to the people in the accounting department, the most often encountered use of tables is to create interesting layouts for HTML pages.

But more on that later. Let's start off by looking at the basic syntax for tables and the various elements and attributes used to create tables. We'll get to the controversy and intrigue (OK, maybe there's no intrigue, but this isn't a John Grisham novel) later. The topics covered in this tutorial are the following:

Contents of this Tutorial		Page
1.	A Tabled Proposal	1
Basic Table Structure		1
Tables and CSS		1
2.	Table Talk	2
Table Captions and Symmary Information		2
3.	Splitting Up Tables	3
Table Columns		3
Row and Column Spans, Empty Cells		4
Row Groups		4
4.	The Head of the Table	5
Table headings		5
Specifying header information		5
5.	Drawing Tables	6
Cell Spacing		6
6.	Living in a Cell	7
Column Widths		7
Table Widths		7
7.	Setting the Table	8
Page Layout Using Tables		8
8.	Exercises	9
HTML with Style Makeover		9
Tabulating your Expenses		9

So let's start with a look at basic table structure.