How To Control Table Widths?

Usually, browsers will calculate the table width based on the content widths of table cells. If you want to control the width of a table, you need to use the "width" attribute, which allows you to set the table width in pixels or percentages of the parent element width.

Below is a tutorial example of using "width" attributes:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
  "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
 <head>
  <title>Table Width</title>
 </head>
 <body>
  <h4>width="30"</h4>
  <table border="1" width="30">
<tr><td>Description</td><td>Qty</td><td>Price</td></tr>
<tr><td>Email Account</td><td>10</td><td>$9.90</td></tr>
<tr><td>FYIcenter.com Ad</td><td>1</td><td>$99.00</td></tr>
<tr><td>1-year Access</td><td>1</td><td>$199.00</td></tr>
  </table>
  <h4>width="300"</h4>
  <table border="1" width="300">
<tr><td>Description</td><td>Qty</td><td>Price</td></tr>
<tr><td>Email Account</td><td>10</td><td>$9.90</td></tr>
<tr><td>FYIcenter.com Ad</td><td>1</td><td>$99.00</td></tr>
<tr><td>1-year Access</td><td>1</td><td>$199.00</td></tr>
  </table>
 </body>
</html>

If you save the above document as table_width.html, and view it with Internet Explorer, you will see two tables with different widths as shown below:

⇒ Missing Cells in HTML Table Row

⇐ 'cellpadding' - Padding Spaces in HTML Table Cell

⇑ HTML Tables and Table Cells

⇑⇑ HTML Tutorials