Creating a Simple CSS Table

The css table is an important part of making web pages user-friendly. It is easy to add a custom look and feel to tables using CSS. By default, however, HTML tables don’t have borders separating one row or column from the next. This makes them a little messy-looking and difficult to read. In this article, we will create a simple table and use CSS to apply custom styles that make it easier for users to read.

The first step is to create a custom look for the top header table row. To do this, we will apply the :nth-child() pseudo-class to all of the th> cells in the top row of the table. This will cause them to all display a blue background color. This will help provide a visual indication to those using assistive technologies that these are headings, and not just random cells.

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Next, we will add some spacing between the cell contents and the border using the padding property. Since cells don’t have borders by default, this is necessary to prevent the content of each row from pushing the border out to the edges of the screen. To do this, we will target all of the th> and td> cells in the table with our padding rule.

Adding borders to table cells is easy enough, but there are a few quirks to watch out for. The border-collapse property determines whether or not the border of a cell collapses into itself (sort of like margin collapsing only bi-directional) or not. If the cell’s border-collapse is set to separate, then it behaves just about how you would expect: the source order of a cell or row element beats any other styles on the cell (border-right or border-left) unless they are both specified.