Table Tutor v 4.1 | by Joe Barta Professional Web Design
Also available: Form Tutor, Frames Tutor and for the novice - So, you want to make a Web Page!
This tutorial is one in a series of WebTutor tutorials and is also available for download as a zip file. Learn in the comfort and privacy of your own home. No salesman will visit.

Hello. My name is Joe and I'm going to give you a few simple lessons on how to make tables for your web documents. You might be thinking that a table is simply one of these but if you've ever seen some of them fancy-like web pages you might be interested to find out that they make good use of the `<TABLE>` tags! Just to illustrate, here is the same page with a gray background and the table BORDERs turned on.

The whole mess basically has only 3 tags...

`<TABLE>`
  The main tag. Used to tell the browser "this is a table", along with some attributes like size, border width and a few other things.
`<TR>`
  TableRow defines a horizontal row of `<TD>` (TableData) cells.
`<TD>`
  Specifies an indiviual block or cell in a table row.

To paraphrase: A table is made up of rows which in turn are made up of cells...

<--This--- | ----is---- | -----a---- | ---Table-- | ----Row-->
|  |  | cell |
| cell |  |  | cell

Well, that's tables in a nutshell. You are now ready to make some tables! Now's a good time to stress that if you want to learn how to make quality html documents, then you would be well served to take the time to teach yourself the tags. If you rely on the so-called "table wizards" in the "easy as pie html editors" out there, you will have greatly limited flexibilty, and the end result may not be what you are trying to achieve. In my opinion the best html editors to use are text based editors. A few good ones that come to mind are listed here. These editors will make your html coding easier. They don't attempt to do it for you.

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