Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

CSS alternatives

Authors may use the text-align property to specify the horizontal alignment for the contents of any table element (including the table element itself). The text-align property may also be applied to any element contained within a table cell, thus overriding the cell- or row-level alignment settings.

For vertical centering, applying the vertical-align style property to the td or th element has the same effect as the valign attribute. The available values for vertical-align when applied to table cells are baseline, top, middle, and bottom.