Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

The Essence of Tables

If you are familiar with table structure in HTML, then the way CSS handles tables should not be a big surprise. For reasons of backward compatibility, the CSS specification used the row-based table layout model as the starting point for additional layout models and properties for controlling presentation. CSS is broader in its scope, however, because it is designed to work with document languages other than just HTML and XHTML. The system for providing table layout capabilities for non-HTML languages is discussed in the "Table Display Values" section at the end of this chapter.

The CSS 2.1 Recommendation is very detailed in its description of the defined behaviors for the table layout model. For a deeper look into the CSS table model , read the specification online at http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/tables.html. Once again, Eric Meyer’s Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly) is the book to turn to for making sense of the spec.

This section provides a summary of some of the key concepts of the CSS table model.