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Tables

The use of tables

You can arrange text and pictures but without using tables you will find yourself extremely
limited. Just look at the front page of this site. Text and pictures neatly arranged side by side.
How? Tables! Look at just about every professional site (and a large number of personal sites)
and you will find they are all using tables.

You don't even have to look beyond this site. I use tables on practically every page here. Tables give me the freedom of arranging text and pictures exactly the way I want. A perhaps better example is my photo site at sphosting.com. You can get to it by clicking the banner below.



In this site the use of tables has enabled me to have multiple columns. I also have the possibility
to arrange the pictures just the way I want them.

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One way of using tables

In order to demonstrate this I will need something to work with (i.e. a picture and a short piece
of text). This is the text:

This cool image is made
with Photoshop 5.05
Three different fonts are
used.

That's the text. Now all I need is a cool .jpg image. So, let's add one! :)

OK, now we have an image and a short piece of text. The purpose of his little experiment is to
use tables to put the text and the image side by side. The table will have to consist of two
columns and one row (BTW I will have to use a slightly different image).
Now let's put it in a table!

This cool image is made
with Photoshop 5.05
Three different fonts are
used.

Not too bad, if I may say so myself. The reason I chose the picture with the dark blue background
was to better show the table used. I also changed the text colour to make it go better with the
image. It is important to have a text colour that match the main colour of the image. I could have
chosen a lighter blue shade as well since that colour is represented also.

Problems with tables using HTML

Just one word of caution. Be very sure to close all tags otherwise all visitors using Netscape will
have a major problem seeing the tables. In fact they won't be able to see them at all! Experience
talking here!

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