Print designers use grids
to create compelling layouts. Using such a structure makes it easy to place
elements into all sorts of layouts, from the front page of a newspaper to a
movie poster to the cover of this book. It also makes the designs visually more
appealing.
When print designers began gravitating toward the Web, they
found the lack of structure frustrating. At most, designers initially could only
float images to the left or right until Netscape invented the center
tag. In fact, it wasn't until HTML tables were used as grids that the web-design
industry took off. Even still, available tools had their limitations and as such
designers overused tables to structure entire web pages.
With CSS-enabled designs, web developers learned they could
forego the practice of manipulating tables to hold designs. However, they also
learned that styling tabular data, such as a calendar, could still be
challenging.
This chapter teaches you how to make your tables look better by
stylizing table headers, setting borders for a table and for its cells, and
reducing gaps with images in table cells. The sample design at the end of the
chapter takes you through the steps required to stylize a calendar.
