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Charles Wyke-Smith

"Stylin' with CSS: A Designer's Guide 2nd Edition"

However, that does not
mean that we shouldn??™t embrace the use of tables for their designated
purpose??”laying out grids of data in rows and columns in the
same manner as a spreadsheet is laid out in Microsoft Excel.
Here??™s a default table displayed in Firefox (Figure 6.1).
FIGURE 6.1 Default table display
with borders turned on using the
XHTML border attribute.
The markup looks like this:














DESIGNING INTERFACE COMPONENTS 177


 Stylin'Codin'
LanguagesXHTML & CSSPHP & SQL
FocusInterface designBack-end code

The above screenshot is how we are used to seeing tables displayed.
Observe how I??™ve added the highlighted presentational border style
on the table tag to turn on the grid; otherwise, the data would just
?¬‚ oat on the page, and it would be hard to see the relationships of
the columns and rows. We??™ll remove it shortly.
There is an awful lot of what Edward Tufte would call ???chart-junk???
in this default display. The boxes around the table and around every
data point attract your eye more than the data itself.
The markup is also very minimal??”a table element contains three
table rows tr, each of which contains three table data td elements
(cells).


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