The following tutorial was modified from an excellent discussion on the mechanics
of HTML Tables coding, distributed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications,
University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign.
Much of the information on the Internet is best presented as a table.
Consider the Periodic Table of Elements;
the elements could easily be described in prose,
but the Periodic Table is so much easier to understand!
The standard for tables on the Web is still evolving and there are some differences in the way the browsers present a given table, but the current releases of the NCSA Mosaic(tm) clients, Netscape 1.1 and above, and all Microsoft Intenet Explorer versions all support tables. As development moves forward and the HTML tables standards become more clearly defined, clients hopefully will present tables more consistently. HTML 3.0 and then HTML 3.2 Draft Specification have defined additional features for tables and the table-enabled browsers support the HTML 3.2 standard. HTML 4.0 has added even more features, that browsers interpret differently or in some cases not at all. However, most of the table features you will be using as a primary tool for display and structure (until Cascading Style Sheets become the primary positioning method).