A cell can contain text, lists and preformatted text, forms and form fields, images and other page objects and more tables.

Some <table> tage attributes, like height, are often used but are technically illegal. Others, like the CAPTION element and summary attribute, are available but - sadly - seldom used.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommends that tables alone are not used to format web pages, rather that authors should apply style sheets conforming to current CSS standards. Using these up-to-date standards provides proper support for new browser versions (which also cope with table layout, of course) and, very importantly, for special-purpose user agents such as those rendering non-visual media.

Using CAPTION and the <table> tag's summary, along with other HTML, will allow users of specialist user agents to garner much more information from your web site, especially where the user agent reads the page to the user.

The <table> Elements

The seven important elements of a HTML table are

• summary
• width
• border
• frame
• rules
• cellspacing
• cellpadding

The <table> element must have a start tag and an end tag

<table>     </table>

and one or more of the seven elements listed above may be included in the opening tag, for example

<table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="6">

The width attribute can be blank (it doesn't appear at all, that is) in which case the user agent must format the cell itself - the de facto standard for such formatting is to collapse the cell to the smallest practical dimensions that will enclose its contents. So if a cell contains an image of 100 pixels by 150 pixels its internal dimensions will be 100x150 plus any area between the content and the cell wall specified by the cellpadding attribute. The cellspacing attribute specified the distance between each cell in a table. As shown below, where the border attribute is set to 1 to show the edges of each cell.