Formatting with Tables

Tables are a great way (heck, about the only way) to lay out a page in an attractive design.

Classic Tables

Auto Sales	East	West
1994	$104,057	$ 56,783
1995	79,943	48,322
1996 (est.)	63,241	35,252

When you think of tables, you probably imagine something tabular of the Excel kind, like the one at right. Fer shure, that's a table and HTML can do that for you. (Of course it can, you're looking at it, aren't you? No, it's not a bitmap.) Notice that you can align text in the cells in different ways, use different colors for cells (in MSIE but not in Netscape), insert links into the table items, plus do all the tricks with fonts that you can outside of tables.

Tabular Trickery

Here's a not-quite-so-obvious use of tables. Let's say you want to show a series of bullet items with text to the left of the items. You want to use a graphic for the bullet. You want to indent the margins a lot. And you want to center the whole mess. There are a few ways to do this, but the table is the most flexible:

Tips for Writing Poetry
	It's always good to rhyme, but be creative. Try rhyming alternate verses, or rhyme words in the middle of a syllable.
	Use unconventional words. If I see another "croon at the moon in June" I will probably puke my guts out.
	Avoid haiku. If haiku is poetry then ketchup is a vegetable. Now, limericks, there's real poetry for you.

So as you can see, tables can be used for a lot more than displaying the gross national product of Slovenia for the past five years. The home page at the WinMag Web site is a complex combination of two tables nested inside each other. Another example of nested tables is in the discussion of URL components in this tutorial. Once you figure those out you'll know you are an HTML table expert.

Table Troubles

Tables have been around for a while, and the stuff you see in this file works pretty well with Netscape Navigator 2.0 and Internet Explorer 2.0. Not all browsers support tables, though. The most ugly example is the browser built into America Online 2.5. AOL plans to offer its users the option to use a real browser by mid-1996, so I wouldn't let that keep you from using tables. They do too many cool things to ignore them.

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