HTML Encyclopaedia

The td tag

The <td> tag is used to introduce a table detail element. For further discussion and examples see the table entry.

1. align

   The align attribute may be used to control the horizontal alignment of an element within a table cell.

   Heading for column 1	Heading for column 2	Heading for column 3
   Item 1	Item 2	Item 3

   The HTML for the above is

   <table border=5>
   <tr><th>Heading for column 1<th>Heading for column 2<th>Heading for column 3
   <tr><td align=left>Item 1<td align=center>Item 2<td align=right>Item 3
   </table>
   

2. bgcolor

   This can be used to highlight a particular cell as shown below

   Heading for column 1	Heading for column 2	Heading for column 3
   Item 1	Item 2	Item 3

   Note that the bgcolor attribute of the <td> tag is not defined in the HTML 3.2 standard however both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape 3 support it, however Netscape 2 does not.

3. valign

   This can be used to control vertical alignment within a cell. The allowed values are top, middle and bottom.

   The effect is illustrated by the following table

   Heading for column 1	Heading for column 2	Heading for column 3

   In the example above all cells also had the align attribute set to center.

4. nowrap

   Normally the text appearing in a table cell is wrapped at the discretion of the display software. Such wrapping can be prevented by using the nowrap attribute as shown below for column 2.

   Column 1	Column 2	Column 3
   A quite long piece of text that is likely to be wrapped to fit into a cell	A really rather long piece of text that will not be wrapped	An item

   Here is the same table without the nowrap attribute

   Column 1	Column 2	Column 3
   A quite long piece of text that is likely to be wrapped to fit into a cell	A really rather long piece of text that will not be wrapped	An item

   Both the above tables had the width attribute associated with the <table> tag.

5. background

   This attribute is not in HTML 3.2. It tiles the background of a cell with an image. The value is the URL of the image file.

   Here is an example.

   Heading for column 1	Heading for column 2	Heading for column 3
   Item 1	Item 2	Item 3

Browsers
Only IE and NN4 honour the background attribute. ARA does not honour the nowrap attribute.