§ 5 - Techniques and Tutorials

§ 5.1 - Use of HTML Table Built-ins

As with HTML itself, tables are managed with table, row, header cell and table cell concepts. Attributes for these may be supplied if desired. While the syntax may seem obvious and perhaps even trite at first, the examples that follow will demonstrate the considerable power of this methodology. First, the built-ins themselves:

Using  [style] ,  [split]  and  [parm]  you can conveniently pre-define part or all of a table format. For instance, if you are using a two-cell per row table, you could do the following and then your table can be done more simply, allowing use of multiple rows:

Using  [t] , you can apply a specific treatment to a list. We can use this to good effect to generate variable length table rows (HTML wants all the rows to be the same length, though, so keep that in mind for this example:

And do we really need to specify the row every time? No:

You can use styles to change the built-in table operators to minimalist versions of themselves, too:

That one left it up to you to add cell options. But if you don't need options, you can put that in the styles too:

Or, if you have a consistent option set you want applied:

Here's a fun one. We'll do a row style that counts rows and automatically alternates row colors:

Lastly, here's a combination of the above, plus automatic row length courtesy of the  [t]  built-in:

Now to embed this code in the page:

Here it is:

Other built-ins used here:  [add] ,  [even] ,  [local] ,  [odd] ,  [parm] ,  [style]  and  [t]