10.2. Styling Tables

You can use many of the CSS properties you've read about to dress up the appearance of a table and its contents. The color property, for example, sets a table's text color, just like anywhere else. You'll find a few properties, however, that are particularly useful with tables, as well as a couple aimed specifically at formatting tables.

Because tables are composed of several HTML tags, it helps to know which tag to apply a particular CSS property to. Applying padding to a <table> tag has no effect. The next few sections cover CSS properties for formatting tables and which HTML tags they get along with.