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Authors: Chuck Musciano Bill Kennedy

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HTML forms provide everything you might expect of an automated form, including input area labels, integrated contents for instructions, default input values, and so on - except automatic input verification; your server-side program or client-side applets need to perform that function.

2.8 Images Are Special

2.10 Tables

Chapter 2

HTML Quick Start

 

2.10 Tables

For a language that emerged from academia - a place steeped in data - it's not surprising to find that HTML supports a set of tags for data tables that not only align your numbers, but can specially format your text, too.

Five tags enable tables, including the

tag itself and a ) tag and its end tag () either table header (
tag for including a description of the table. Special tag attributes let you change the look and dimensions of the table.

You create a table row by row, putting between the table row (

) or table data () tags and their respective contents for each cell in the table. Headers and data may contain nearly any regular HTML content, including text, images, forms, and even another table. As a result, you can also use HTML tables for advanced text formatting, such as for multicolumn text and sidebar headers (see
Figure 2.5
). For more information, see Chapter 11,

Tables.

Figure 2.5: HTML tables let you perform page layout tricks, too

2.9 Lists, Searchable

2.11 Frames

Documents, and Forms

Chapter 2

HTML Quick Start

 

2.11 Frames

Anyone who has had more than one application window open on their graphical desktop at a time can immediately appreciate the benefits of frames. Frames let you divide the browser window into multiple display areas, each containing a different document. For more information on frames, see
Chapter 12, Frames
.

Figure 2.6
is an example of a frame display. It shows how the document window may be divided into many individual windows separated by rule lines and scroll bars. What is not immediately apparent in the example, though, is that each frame may display an independent document, and not necessarily HTML ones, at that. A frame may contain any valid content that the browser is capable of displaying, including multimedia. If the frame's contents include a hypertext link the user selects, the new document's contents, even another frame document, may replace that same frame, another frame's content, or the entire browser window.

Figure 2.6: Frames divide the window into many document displays

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