HTML for the World Wide Web, Fifth Edition, with XHTML and CSS

Chapter 14. Tables

Tables have a storied history on the Web. While originally conceived just to hold tabular data, they were quickly appropriated for a much bigger task: serving as the foundation for complicated layouts, with multiple columns, sidebars and many other features that were simply impossible before the advent of CSS. The problem is that layouts with tables tend to be so complex that they are difficult to set up and cumbersome to update.

Now that CSS is here and well supported, you can create beautiful layouts without tables (see page 175). However, those layouts will degrade, and sometimes not very gracefully, in older browsers. If you’re not ready to give up on the 10% of the population who aren’t using browsers with decent CSS support—some ...