HTML 4_01 Weekend Crash Course - G. Perry

through the characters so you know what is available for you to use. To produce the line that included the paragraph tag in the previous example, you could use the greater-than and less-than character codes on the screen like this:

Use the paragraph tag, <p>, to add a blank line between paragraphs.

Many of the character codes have an equivalent character entity (also shown in Table 11-1) that enables you to use a more memorable mnemonic for some of the codes. For example, you can specify è or è when you want to display the small e with a grave accent, è.

Table 11-1

Special Character Codes

##

$$

%%

&&

££ £

Afternoon Saturday—III Part

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Afternoon Saturday—III Part

11 Session

÷÷

One code not included in the table is   that creates a nonbreaking space. If you embed &nbsp; between two words, for example, the browser will not break a line between them but will keep the two words together.

Most browsers provide support for most of the characters in Table 11-1. If you use the special characters, test your page in several of the more popular browsers to make sure that the codes work as you expect. (Such advice is true of all pages; always view your Web pages in as many browsers and in as many different resolution levels as possible to ensure that your Web page retains the look you prefer.)

Afternoon Saturday—III Part

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Preparing Columnar Data Tables

Tables consist of rows and columns. A useful table might contain only one row and three columns. The purpose of the table determines how elaborate the table must become. Tables can be nested, which means that they can reside inside other tables. Therefore, a single cell might contain an entire table, and one of the inside table cells might hold yet another table.

Never embed more than two levels of tables if your Web page loads slowly. A single table, even one with many rows and columns, loads much faster than a table that contains other

Never tables. The power of these nested tables, however, makes them so useful that your application should determine whether or not you nest tables instead of simply considering load time. In addition, some browsers, most notably Netscape 4, do not display nested tables properly unless the user has upgraded to a more recent version.

Tables require several different kinds of table-related command tags. You cannot type table text directly into HTML as rows and columns of information because browsers ignore all extra spaces and tabs in your HTML source.

Creating tables

All tables begin with the <table> command tag and terminate with a subsequent </table> command tag. Within the table, you’ll specify rows with the <tr> (for table row) tag and columns with the <td> (for table detail) tag. In addition to cells that hold data, you may also create header cells that hold titles for the

data in the columns.

One of the best ways to begin a table that contains simple columnar data is to type the data directly into your HTML code. Remembering that HTML completely ignores extra spaces and tabs that you use, you can more easily plan your table by using your text editor to create the initial layout.

Afternoon Saturday—III Part

12 Session