Table Menu

Status of HTML Tables
Please pardon the preliminary nature of this Help section -- it is still under construction. For more detailed information on HTML 3.0 tables, check the online documentation at

   http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/html3/CoverPage.html

Please note that the HTML tables specification is a work in progress, currently under review, not a formal specification or standard.

Not all table attributes are supported in HTML.edit, as I have opted for a more conservative approach, awaiting a more formal status on the tables specification. Note that on September 12th, 1995, Dave Raggett released a new version of his tables specification for review by the IETF HTML working group. This included a richer set of attribute values than previous versions. It remains to be seen which will be supported by future browsers. Note that currently not all browsers support HTML tables, so I would recommend providing those users with an alternative presentation where possible.

For more information on the current set of available table options and attributes, check the available online documentation. Here's an example table showing some of the attributes available from the previous tables draft:

Example

 <TABLE BORDER=3>
   <CAPTION>A test table with merged cells</CAPTION>
   <TR><TH ROWSPAN=2><TH COLSPAN=2>Average
       <TH ROWSPAN=2>other<BR>category<TH>Misc
   <TR><TH>height<TH>weight
   <TR><TH ALIGN=LEFT>males<TD>1.9<TD>0.003
   <TR><TH ALIGN=LEFT ROWSPAN=2>females<TD>1.7<TD>0.002
 </TABLE>

The Table menu contains:

New Table…
Creates a new table at the current insertion point in the document. There are options for a table ID and border in the dialog box displayed. If the Border checkbox is checked, the width of the border framing the table may be specified in the text box. If no value is included, but the box is checked, a "BORDER" attribute will be added with no value (this defaults on most browsers to "1"). If no border is desired, either leave the checkbox unchecked, or specify "BORDER=0".

Caption
Adds a table caption element (<CAPTION></CAPTION>) at the current insertion point.

Header
Inserts a table header tag <TH> at the current insertion point.

Row
Inserts a row tag <TR> at the current insertion point. Shortcut: Command-Y.

Cell
Inserts a cell tag <TD> at the current insertion point. Shortcut: Command-D.

Import as Table…
Displays a dialog box where you may select a text file. After selecting options for cell delimiter and how to treat the first row and column, the text file is imported and translated into an HTML table, and inserted into the document at the current insertion point. This command could be used to import tab-delimited text files directly as HTML tables.

Export as Table…
Exports an HTML table (using the current text selection) to a text file, with table translation options for converting row and cell delimiters to tabs, spaces, etc.

Convert submenu Commands
Including Convert Text to Table, Text to Rows, and Table to Text…

Back to Form menu, on to Heading menu, or return to Tool Palette Menus.