CS-081 Assignment 6

This is a simple assignment: add a table to one of your blog entries.

1. Choose some tabular information to put in your table.

   The information you put in your table can be anything you want, so long as its natural structure is tabular. One way to decide whether you have made a reasonable choice or not is see whether or not there are natural column headings for the table. For example, in a table of student grades the column headings might be Name, First Exam, Second Exam, etc.; in a monthly calendar, the headings would be the days of the week; in a catalog of your music collection the column headings might be the name of the artist, the title of the item, the recording media type, the genre, your ranking, comments, etc. But a grid of pictures would not have natural column headings unless they were somehow organized by content categories.

   For this assignment, there are some side issues: your table must be divided into one or more heading rows, one or more footing rows, and two or more content rows. Furthermore, there must be two cells that merge together in your table (either horizontally or vertically) even if it doesn’t really make sense for the information you are putting in the table! (This is an academic exercise, after all.)

2. Set up the table and format it using CSS.

   You will need to use the following elements to construct your table: table, thead, tfoot, tbody, tr and td. It is possible to consturct the table without using th, but it would make sense to use this element for all the cells inside the thead element. You can also use th elsewhere, if it makes sense. At least one of your td or th elements must have a colspan or rowspan attribute. Remember that the footing row(s) come before the body rows when you put the code for the table in the blog entry.

   Your table must have a caption. Format the caption so that it looks good and is positioned in a meaningful way relative to the table itself.

   Use CSS to format your table. The outside of the table and at least some (if not all) of the table cells must have visible borders. Make sure there is some padding between the cell contents and the borders to make the cells easy to read (assuming you use text or numbers for the cell contents). Format the heading row(s), the body rows, and the footing row(s) differently from each other. Be sure the table fits within the confines of the blog entry list item that contains it. Be sure the XHTML and CSS all validate using the W3C validators.

3. Optional: Use col and/or colgroup.

   For extra credit, format one or more columns of the table differently using either col or colgroup elements.

I will check your assignment by copying it from Maple to Babbage; to submit the assignment, send me an email with your name in the message body saying it is ready for me to look at. Send your email to me by midnight on the due date (November 20). My email address is:

The Subject Line of your email must say CS-081 Assignment 6, exactly like that, in order to avoid my spam filters.