Description

Just as the th element uses colspans, so can the td element, whereby data can be shared across numerous columns in a table. The concept is best explained by comparing the example HTML above with #colspan/fig-td-colspan (where someone’s work availability for Tuesday is indicated as free for the whole day by spanning it across four time slots).

Figure 1. Colspans applied to several cells in this table showing someone’s availability for work.

Care must be taken when introducing a colspan attribute that everything adds up to same amount of cells. Some tables, however, can get quite complicated with a mixture of colspan and rowspan attributes, and this is not something that you are advised to hand-code, as it is asking for trouble - it is much better to use a WYSISWYG editor, such as Dreamweaver, MS Expression or similar, which will allow you to merge and unmerge cells very easily and will take care of these attributes for you.

Note that when using the rowspan attribute, you cannot span a cell beyond the boundary of its containing rowgroup (namely the thead, tfoot or tbody elements). Hence, if the tbody comprises 10 rows, the rowspan of a cell that is defined in the first row cannot have a value greater than "10".