Why use a table??

In my opinion, a table is one of the most important tags in html. It gives you great control over the layout of your page. It will allow you to break up your page into sections, use white space, use columns and rows, and much more.

A table was first created for the use of charts on html pages. It allowed people to place figures on a web page in chart form so they wouldn't be distorted. It didn't take long for web designers to learn that tables was there key to creating the layout they desired.

To imagine a table, take a piece of paper, pretend that is your page, and draw tic-tac-toe squares. This could be done on a web page using the table tag. Lets create a table and see what the result would be.

<table border=1 width=100>
<tr>
<td></td><td></td><td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td></td><td></td><td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td></td><td></td><td></td>
</tr>
</table>

The table you see above was created with the code directly above it. Now lets learn what each tag does.

The <table> tag obviously starts the table. It also has and ending tag that is required.

The <tr> tag is a table row. You use this tag every time you want to start a new row within your table. You also must use and ending tag with <tr>.

The <td> tag means table data. This tag will give you a new cell each time you use it. Don't forget to end the <td>, it is required also.

Now that we know how to create a table, lets go see what we can do with it to make it suit our needs.

Now lets go to Step 2