Table Tutor
SITE MAP | by
Hello. My name is Joe and I'm going to give you a few simple lessons on how to make tables for your web documents. You might be thinking that a table is simply one of these but if you've ever seen some of them fancy-like web pages you might be interested to find out that they make good use of the <table> tags! Just to illustrate, here is the same page with a gray background and the table borders turned on.
The whole mess basically has only 3 tags...
| <table> | The main tag. Used to tell the browser "this is a table", along with some attributes like size, border width and a few other things. |
| <tr> | Table Row defines a horizontal row of <td> (Table Data) cells. |
| <td> | Specifies an individual block or cell in a table row. |
To paraphrase: A table is made up of rows which in turn are made up of cells...
| <--this-- | ----is--- | ----a---- | --table-- | ---row--> |
| cell | ||||
| cell | cell |
Well, that's tables in a nutshell. You are now ready to make some tables! Now's a good time to stress that if you want to learn how to make quality html documents, then you would be well served to take the time to teach yourself the tags. If you rely on the so-called "table wizards" in the "easy as pie html editors" out there, you will have greatly limited flexibilty, and the end result may not be what you are trying to achieve. In my opinion the best html editors to use are text based editors or just plain text editors. I use NoteTab Pro... easily one of the most powerful text editors on the planet (and probably a few other planets as well ;-)
And while we're at it, if you're still using Microsoft's Internet Explorer, you might want to give a look. It's absolutely free and has some excellent tools for the web developer... especially if you're going to do any Javascripting. I use it all the time and I think it's faster and better all the way around. Even if you decide to stick with Explorer, it will at least give you a second browser to check your pages with... which is a very useful thing to do.
