As I said last month, this month I will be concentrating on the practical uses of tables. This is the first part in a two part article. Hopefully you will return on 1st of July when the second part will be published.
It might seem at first that the table is pretty much useless unless you want to present tabular information but this is not true.
Of course the table can be used to present tabular data, but it is also great as a layout tool. This page is in fact laid out using a table or tables.
Presenting tabular data on a web page is much harder than doing it in a word processor but far easier than writing Javascript, for example.
In the fist row you place the heading for the columns, making sure to leave one cell blank at the start. Then in the first cell of each row you place the heading you want for that row.
For example imagine that you want to create a table comparing two CDs. You want a column of the songs on one CD, a column of the songs on the other CD, and a column stating which one you prefer. [Note that this is not the best way to compare CDs it is just an example of a table] Also as I said earlier you will have to leave one cell blank at the start.
<table border=1>
<tr>
<td><br></td>
<td><b>Jack Lukeman - Metropolis Blue</b></td>
<td><b>No Doubt - Tragic Kingdom</b></td>
<td><b>Preferred [JL / ND] </b></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><b>1.</b></td>
<td align=left>When the Moon is High</td>
<td align=left>Spiderwebs</td>
<td align=right>ND</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><b>2.</b></td>
<td align=left>Ode to Ed Wood</td>
<td align=left>Excuse me Mister</td>
<td align=right>JL</td>
</tr>
...
</table>
I'm sure you get the idea. Let's try another one.
Imagine you have a number of products, some are from Africa, some are from India and some are American. You want a table which will tell you where each product is from and will also be able to read, so as you could see at a glance how many products are from India, for example.
We could design a simple table with two columns, one with product number and one with the products country of origin. For a large amount of products however this would make it very difficult to check how many products were from America, India or Africa alone.
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