HTML Tables

HTML tables allow web developers to arrange data into rows and columns.

Example

Define an HTML Table

A table in HTML consists of table cells inside rows and columns

Example

A simple HTML table:

<table>
  <tr>
    <th>Company</th>
    <th>Contact</th>
    <th>Country</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Alfreds Futterkiste</td>
    <td>Maria Anders</td>
    <td>Germany</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Centro comercial Moctezuma</td>
    <td>Francisco Chang</td>
    <td>Mexico</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Table Cells

Each table cell is defined by a <td> and a </td> tag.

td stands for table data.

Everything between <td> and </td> are the content of the table cell.

Example

<table>
  <tr>
    <td>Emil</td>
    <td>Tobias</td>
    <td>Linus</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Note: table data elements are the data containers of the table.
They can contain all sorts of HTML elements; text, images, lists, other tables, etc.

Table Rows

Each table row starts with a <tr> and end with a </tr> tag.

tr stands for table row.

Example

<table>
  <tr>
    <td>Emil</td>
    <td>Tobias</td>
    <td>Linus</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>16</td>
    <td>14</td>
    <td>10</td>
  </tr>
</table>

You can have as many rows as you like in a table, just make sure that the number of cells are the same in each row.

Note: There are times where a row can have less or more cells than another. You will learn about that in a later chapter.

Table Headers

Sometimes you want your cells to be headers, in those cases use the <th> tag instead of the <td> tag:

Example

Let the first row be table headers:

<table>
  <tr>
    <th>Person 1</th>
    <th>Person 2</th>
    <th>Person 3</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Emil</td>
    <td>Tobias</td>
    <td>Linus</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>16</td>
    <td>14</td>
    <td>10</td>
  </tr>
</table>

By default, the text in <th> elements are bold and centered, but you can change that with CSS.

HTML Table Tags