Chapter 4. Creating Tables

Tables are a very helpful way of presenting data on a website. Tables have an interesting history on the Web, though—one that bears a little discussion before you dig in and begin creating them.

As many readers might be aware, the Web was created by a physicist. Tim Berners-Lee had a vision that the technology could be used as a highly efficient means of distributing and sharing research documents. So tables are an extension of that original idea: They were added to the growing language of HTML as a means to share data with other researchers and scientists.

At the time, CSS hadn't emerged, so there was no technology available to specifically address the way pages were laid out. Because tables create a grid, it ...

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