Chapter 11. Table Layout
You may have glanced at the title of this chapter and wondered,
"Table layout? Isn't that exactly
what we're trying to avoid doing?"
Indeed so, but this chapter is not about using tables
for layout. Instead, it's about
the ways that tables themselves are laid out within CSS, which is a
far more complicated affair than it might first appear.
That's why the subject gets its own chapter.
Tables are unique, compared
to the rest of document layout. As of CSS2.1, tables alone possess
the unique ability to associate element sizes with other
elements—all the cells in a row have the same height, for
example, no matter how much or how little content each individual
cell might contain. The same is true for the widths of cells that
share a column. There is no other situation in layout where elements
from different parts of the document tree influence each
others' sizing and layout in so direct a way.
As we'll see, this uniqueness is purchased at the
expense of a great many behaviors and rules that apply to tables, and
only tables. In the course of the chapter, we'll
look at how tables are visually assembled, two different ways to draw
cell borders, and the mechanisms that drive the height and width of
tables and their internal elements.
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