Heads up! To view this whole video, sign in with your Courses account or enroll in your free 7-day trial. Sign In Enroll
Preview
Start a free Courses trial
to watch this video
Tables should only be used for displaying tabular data and not for positioning images and text, because that can now be done with CSS.
Resources
If you'd like to learn more about tables, be sure to read the Mozilla Developer Network documentation for the <table> element and other elements that relate to tables.
Back in the 90s and into the 2000s,
rendering inconsistencies between
0:00
browsers meant that tables were a good
option for web page layout.
0:05
People would create a table, and then
would create cells
0:10
to place all of their text and images on
the page.
0:14
This worked pretty well at the time
because, CSS was still maturing
0:17
and there weren't too many other great
ways to get an exact look.
0:22
However, browsers have improved a lot and
those days are long behind us.
0:27
So, you should never use tables for layout
in a web browser.
0:32
In other words, tables should only be used
for displaying tabular data.
0:36
And not for positioning images and text,
because that can now be done with CSS.
0:42
There is one major exception to this.
0:49
In HTML emails, tables are still used for
layout.
0:51
Because rendering and consistencies, still
persists.
0:56
The table that we made is not very
interactive,
1:00
so here are two challenges for you to
consider.
1:03
If you continue to learn about front end
1:07
development, try adding some jQuery to
your table.
1:09
With the right plug-in, you can add
features
1:14
like sorting and filtering to an otherwise
static table.
1:16
If you learn about back end languages,
like Ruby, PHP, or
1:21
Python, try to see if you can populate a
table dynamically.
1:25
By using data from a database.
1:30
Databases store information in a table
structure.
1:32
So it's very normal to see data from a
1:36
database, rendered in the form of an HTML
table.
1:39
This is common in website administration
interfaces,
1:44
where you need to manage all of
1:48
your data without writing database queries
every time you want to make a change.
1:49
That about wraps things up for HTML
tables.
1:55
If there's one thing that you take away
from
1:58
this, remember that tables are used for
tabular data.
2:00
You need to sign up for Treehouse in order to download course files.
Sign up