Web Standards Programmer's Reference: HTML, CSS, JavaScript®, Perl, Python®, and PHP

17.1. CSS Properties and Table Attributes

There are many CSS properties that can be used to control table attributes in your document. The following table lists the basic properties available and how they correspond to table element (<table>) attributes.

Purpose	Table Attribute	CSS Property(ies)
Borders	border	border properties
Spacing inside cell	cellpadding	padding properties
Spacing between cells	cellspacing	border-spacing
Width of table	width	width and table-layout properties
Table framing	frame	border properties
Alignment	align, valign	text-align, vertical-alignment properties

Because many of the table element's attributes have not been deprecated in XHTML, you may be tempted to embed all of your document's table formatting within individual table tags. Resist that temptation. Using tag attributes increases the editing difficulty of the document—each table using tag attributes instead of CSS properties must be edited individually. If you use CSS properties instead, you can modify many tables by editing only one style (or a few styles). Furthermore, if you use external style sheets, you can effect changes in multiple documents by editing only a few styles.

The next few sections detail the CSS properties for formatting tables.

17.1.1. Defining Borders

Tables use border properties to control the border of document tables and their subelements. For example, to surround every table and their subelements with a single 1pt border, you could use a style definition similar to the following:

/* Format ...