Using
invisible tables to control the layout of your web page
can be useful in many ways.
If you just simply place text on your web page it may
look good in your web browser but if you change the
size of your browser window the text will re-flow to
fill your browser window. This may completely destroy
your beautifully laid out web page.
One way to give you more control over the layout and
make your web page design more interesting is to use
tables.
Tables can be used to control many aspects of the web
page. They can be used to place text into columns, images
next to text, navigation buttons in rows or columns,
and many more things.
Tables can also be used to control how your page looks
in different sized browser windows. If you wish parts
of your page to stretch and fill out the whole page
no matter what size browser window the user is using
you can set the table width attribute to fill a percentage
of the browser window.
Alternatively, you may wish parts or all of your web
page to remain the same size and layout no matter what
size browser window the user is using. Setting the width
attribute of the table by a fixed pixel width can do
this.
The design of this page uses tables to control the layout.
If you resize your browser window try to workout which
parts of the page are using tables of a fixed pixel
width and which are resizing to fill the whole screen.
