![]() | ![]() No - not THAT sort of Table!!
TABLES can improve the layout and organisation of your pages in a number of ways, but don't use them just because you CAN - they need to be there for a reason! When your page is being viewed, the whole table has to be loaded before any of it shows up on the page so if your whole page is one giant Table this could slow the procedure down considerably, and the casual surfer could well get tired of waiting and move on. If you need to use Tables, try to use several and cut the information into manageable "chunks" which will load one at a time and give the surfer something to look at while the next bit loads!
this type of table requires a border to be set in the opening Table tag - you can set border width and (in MIE) colour. (Default colour is grey and is the one you are most likely to see used.) The table above has a border set at 5 and is in the default grey, which doesn't show up very well on a white page!
You will also want to set the Table Width in either pixels or a percentage of the page width, cellspacing -also in pixels, the distance between the cells of the table - usually a small number, and cellpadding, the distance between the sides of the cell and the data within it. where all the numbers (sizes in pixels) are variables you can alter to suit yourself - and at the very end of the Table, don't forget the closing tag! </TABLE> |
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You now have the boundaries of your table set; next you have to start adding data. If you can't easily visualise the layout of your table, you might find it helpful to do a rough sketch on paper first. will produce this:
In actual practice you will also want to specify cellspacing and cellpadding too, and possibly table border colour and background, as in the first Table tag example on this page. ![]()
<TABLE WIDTH="600" BORDER="3" BORDERCOLOR="000077" BGCOLOR="eeeeee" CELLSPACING="2" CELLPADDING="5">
NOTE: it is only necessary to set the cell width on the first row - all the cells beneath will be the same width as the ones above. Cell widths can be set to the actual number of pixels wide or as a percentage of the total width of the Table.
![]() Next Tables page - more complex tables
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