CSS Cookbook

6.6. Sample Design: An Elegant Calendar

Great for organization, calendars enable us to schedule lunches, remember birthdays, and plan honeymoons. As designers, we can think of all those months, dates, and appointments as tabular data.

If you display your calendar as an HTML table, chances are the table looks rather plain, and if it contains numerous events then it probably looks somewhat convoluted as well. In this design, we use CSS to create a calendar that is more legible than what you could create using vanilla HTML.

First, take a look at Figure 6-7, which shows the markup for the calendar without styles.

Figure 6-7. The calendar without styles

Next, look at the markup itself to see how it’s set up. As you learned in Recipe 6.1, the cellspacing attribute needs to be set in the table element:

<table cellspacing="0">

Now, set the first three rows of table headers, th, containing the year, month, and days, in their own rows within their own table headers:

 <tr>
  <th colspan="7" id="year">
   <a href="year.html?previous">&lt;</a> 2000 <a 
href="year.html?next">&gt;</a>
  </th>
 </tr>
 <tr>
  <th colspan="7" id="month">
   <a href="month.html?previous">&lt;</a> October <a 
href="month.html?next">&gt;</a>
  </th>
 </tr>
  <tr id="days">
  <th>Sunday</th>
  <th>Monday</th>
  <th>Tuesday</th>
  <th>Wednesday</th>
  <th>Thursday</th>
  <th>Friday </th>
  <th>Saturday</th>
 </tr>

The first date is October 1, which in this calendar ...