HTML Coding
Tricks with Tables
By Laura Lemay
A number of years ago when I was a poor college student, I owned just a few basic tools: a big crescent wrench, a screwdriver or two, and a hammer. One day I was looking to pound a nail into a wall, and I couldn't find the hammer, so I used the crescent wrench instead. When I mentioned this to my boyfriend at the time, he gave me a stern talking to about using the appropriate tool for the job. But it didn't really matter all that much to me. The crescent wrench may not have been designed for hammering nails, but the nail stayed in the wall.
Web designers today face a similar problem when trying to design interesting pages in HTML. HTML was not designed for page layout; you cannot arrange elements in exact positions on a Web page the way you can in a PageMaker or QuarkXPress document. HTML works best for displaying simple information top to bottom and left to right.
But that doesn't stop resourceful Web designers. HTML may not be the most appropriate tool for the task, but it is the tool at hand, and Web designers are managing to accomplish page layout in HTML as best they can-to great success—through a variety of devious means. My favorite, and the subject of this column, is the borderless table.
Borderless Tables
Tables themselves were designed as a way of displaying columnar data. In fact, the HTML table officially contains only two kinds of cells: heading cells and data cells. But if you can put any HTML into any cell—including images, lists, other tables, forms and anything else you can put on a Web page—then things start to look interesting.
