Some Questions, Answers and Observations

Questions

In the spirit of anticipating your question (or maybe flame), we offer the following information.

Why isn't there information on using Tables to build Web pages?

Basically, Web page design fell outside the scope of what we wanted to cover. There are many excellent Web pages now that make imaginative use of tables as a way to position text and graphics. Just check the source code of some of the award-winning pages and you'll likely see a lot of table code. We'll let someone else show you how that is done.

Where are the <caption> and <TH> containers?

We didn't forget them.

In the case of the <caption> container, we felt that it has a serious flaw. It insists on centering text. That may be OK for a single line, but a lot of the tables that we encounter (check our examples) have multiple-line captions. A lot of uneven-length lines are hard to read when they are centered. Note that we were able to get the left-aligned caption we wanted by using a table cell which was expanded to full table width using the colspan modifier in a TD container.

The <TH> container is very similar to the <TD> container. You can get the same effect just by bolding text (putting it into a <b> ... </b> container) and centering it. We reasoned that since these are simple operations, and you have more control if you do it yourself, why should you bother to learn about something that doesn't add to your capabilities (and might be downright confusing).

I can't make any sense of your HTML code when I look at the source of some of your pages. What is this &# ... stuff?

In order to show you the HTML table code, we had to "hide" it from the browser (otherwise, your browser would turn it into a table). The "HTML Escape Sequence Codes" let you do just that. If you want more information, follow this link to a page that shows you what codes are available.

A Bit of Philosophy

We have tried to hold to some standards in building these pages and the resources they provide. Forgive our being so blatant, but we thought that we should record these goals, if for no other reason than to remind ourselves of a few things that get lost too easily.

Be bandwidth gentle. Not everyone has a T-1 line.
Remember that images get cached. Don't use too many icons, for example, just to be using them. Repeating icons is "download friendly."
Keep the backgrounds simple. We prefer bgcolor= over background gifs most of the time. If you make an exception, it had better look good and not violate the low bandwidth goal and harm readability.
Be consistent. We tried particularly hard, for example, to develop sets of symbols that were very consistent.
Try to be brief. (Well, you can't win them all.)
 Table Sources      Take Me Home!