Cellpadding and Cellspacing in CSS (part 2)

Thursday, June 5th, 2008  CSS, XHTML

Here is a follow up to the cellpadding and cellspacing post I made a while back. The cellpadding and cellspacing can be completely controlled in CSS. I realized today; I spoke only about collapsing the borders and not creating spacing (or the equivalent of cellspacing equal to something other than 0).


Here are some HTML4 and CSS/XHTML equivalents:



HTML4:

<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">

CSS:

table { border-collapse: collapse; }
table tr td { padding: 0px; }



HTML4:

<table cellspacing="2" cellpadding="0">

CSS:

table { border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 2px; }
table tr td { padding: 0px; }



HTML4:

<table cellspacing="2" cellpadding="2">

CSS:

table { border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 2px; }
table tr td { padding: 2px; }



You may want to place these definitions into a CSS class so you can quickly reference your table definition in XHTML:



CSS:

table.info { border: 1px solid #ccc; border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 2px; }
table.info tr th { font-weight: normal; text-align: right; }
table.info tr td { font-weight: bold; padding: 2px; }




HTML:

<table class="info">
  <tr><th>First Name:</th><td>Chris</td></tr>
  <tr><th>Last Name:</th><td>Schuld</td></tr>
</table>



Here is what it will look like:

First Name: Chris
Last Name: Schuld



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