I've Been
Tabled!
No Surprises here. Everything is laid out on the table for you to see — whether I wanted to show you or not.
I wanted this cell to be only 100 pixels wide, but it wanted to be as wide as the image above. I tried using HTML and CSS, but it would not shrink.
This cell's height has been adjusted to 1000 pixels in an effort to fill this column with color. Then the valign was set to "top" to push the content to the top of the cell.
Images, text and links were butting the edges of the cell, so I used cellpadding—no, that didn't work. I tried cellspacing—rats, that didn't work either. I used CSS to add 5-pixel padding in the cell.
Click those links up there to be taken away from this page. Hope you bookmarked this page.
Oh, you are probably savvy enough to use your back button — not everyone is. But the back button only worked on the first link. The second two links opened new browser windows.
Early web designers quickly learned to use the HTML table for more than presenting data in columns and rows:
| a | b | c | d | e | f | g | h | i | j |
| A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 0 |
| h | e | l | l | o | w | o | r | l | d |
This tool opened up a whole new world of design. Adding valign, align, height, width, colors and borders provided lots of design opportunity.
The BR tag and the magic invisible resizable spacer gif helped move objects into desired positions. The HR tag helped separate objects.
But the big problem with tables was the waiting. A table requires all of its parts to be loaded before it will display any of its parts. So a many celled table or a table containing a large image would present as a blank page until all its contents were downloaded to the viewer's computer.
Back in the day of dial-up modems, this was a huge problem. Designers wanted to use pretty pictures, but viewers did not want to wait. I can remember folding laundry while I surfed the web because the pages took so long to load. It was not uncommon for users to turn off images to speed up browsing.
While the table is more elegant than the frame, it still does not provide the control available through CSS.
Marrying the table with CSS can yield some great design! But you still have to wait for that whole table to download.
Last I added a two-column cell as a footer and filled it with flowers.