Idocs Guide to HTML
Home >> Tables >> <TABLE ...>
previous page<TABLE WIDTH="..."><TABLE BACKGROUND="..."> next page

Attribute for <TABLE ...>
BGCOLOR = color expression

BGCOLOR sets the background color of the entire table. For example, this code creates a table with a background color of yellow:

this code produces this 
<TABLE BGCOLOR=YELLOW>
<TR>
   <TD>lemons</TD>
   <TD>grapefruit</TD>
   </TR>
<TR>
   <TD>bananas</TD>
   <TD>pineapple</TD>
   </TR>
</TABLE>
lemons grapefruit
bananas pineapple

You can also set the background colors of rows with <TR BGCOLOR="..."> and of individual cells with <TD BGCOLOR="...">.

Netscape and MSIE have different ways of displaying the background color. MSIE fills the entire table with the background color. Netscape only fills the cells, but not the spaces between the cells, resulting in an annoying block of individual colored cells:
MSIE MSIE version
Netscape Netscape version
You can kludge around the Netscape bug by enclosing the table in a one-cell outer table:

this code produces this 
<TABLE BGCOLOR="#CCCC99"><TR><TD>
<TABLE>
<TR>
   <TD>lemons</TD>
   <TD>grapefruit</TD>
   </TR>
<TR>
   <TD>bananas</TD>
   <TD>pineapple</TD>
   </TR>
</TABLE>
</TD></TR></TABLE>
lemons grapefruit
bananas pineapple

previous page<TABLE WIDTH="..."><TABLE BACKGROUND="..."> next page
Copyright 1997-2002 Idocs Inc. Content in this guide is offered freely to the public under the terms of the Open Content License and the Open Publication License. Contents may be redistributed or republished freely under these terms so long as credit to the original creator and contributors is maintained.