Chapter 7
Building Tables
In Chapter 4, you learned how to mark up all kinds of content: headings, paragraphs, lists, and more.
You’ve also learned how to embed images and other media into your web pages. So far, so good, right? If
you can believe it, we’re still not done introducing ways to mark up content in HTML. In this chapter, we
introduce you to the powerful—and often maligned—data table.
But, before we do that: a brief history lesson.
The Table's Lament
From time to time, you may hear some seasoned developers decry the use of the table element. They
speak not out of ignorance of the table's legitimate use, but out of remembrance for a time long since
passed.
Beginning a scant five years after Tim Berners-Lee created the Web, the metaphorical Browser Wars
erupted when Microsoft, with its Internet Explorer browser, went toe-to-toe (and feature-for-feature), with
Netscape's Navigator browser. This "war," lasting from roughly 1995 through the early 2000s, marked a
period of incredibly rapid advances in web technology, particularly HTML.
In an effort to attract a larger share of the burgeoning web audience, browser makers invented their own,
non-standard HTML elements and attributes with reckless abandon. If Netscape added support for a new,
custom HTML element, Microsoft would add support for that element in addition to support for another of
their own creation.
