11.4 Summary

Even if you're quite familiar with table layout from years of table-and-spacer design, it turns out that the mechanisms driving such layout are rather complicated and not at all deterministic. Thanks to the legacy of HTML table construction, the CSS table model is row-centric, but it does, thankfully, accommodate columns and limited column styling. Thanks to new abilities to affect cell alignment and table width, you now have even more tools for presenting tables in a pleasing way.

The ability to apply table-related display value to arbitrary elements opens the door to creating table-like layouts using HTML elements such as div, or in XML languages where any element could be used to describe layout components. As of this writing, most browsers other than Internet Explorer support the application of table-related display values to arbitrary elements. Even in its current form, CSS makes presentation more sophisticated, as does the subject of the next chapter: generated content.