Add borders on

Question

In another post I read that if I need to add borders to every row except the header row I should use THEAD & TBODY. So I have added it to the page, but I cannot find how to apply it to the TBODY. I am a newbie so bear with me. I can put borders around the entire table, but need to exclude the header row. Here is a copy of a table with the border attributes in the TABLE tag where it works fine.

<table width="300" BORDER=1 CELLPADDING=3 CELLSPACING=1 RULES=ROWS FRAME=BOX>
              <thead>
                <tr>
                    <th width="60" align="center" valign="top" scope="col">Type</th>
                    <th width="200" align="left" valign="top" scope="col">Address</th>
                </tr>
              </thead>
    <tbody>
                <tr>
                    <td align="center" valign="top">Shipping</td>
                    <td align="left" valign="top">123 Main St</td>
                </tr>
    </tbody>
</table>

Any help is appreciated.

David Thomas · Accepted Answer

You should use CSS for presentation/styling:

tbody {
    border: 1px solid #ccc;
}

JS Fiddle demo.

I'm not sure how new you are, but for completeness:

<head>
    <!-- other stuff -->
    <style type="text/css">

        tbody {
            border: 1px solid #ccc;
        }

    </style>
    <!-- other stuff -->
</head>

You could also use inline styles in the element's opening tag, for example:

<tbody style="border: 1px solid #ccc;">

Preferably, though, you'd link to an external stylesheet, this goes into the head of the document:

<link href="path/to/stylesheet.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

Or, if you're targeting those browsers that don't offer the option to style the tbody with a border, you can target specific cells within the tbody using the following:

table {
    margin: 0;
    border-spacing: 0;
}

tbody tr td:first-child {
    border-left: 2px solid #000;
}

tbody tr td:last-child {
    border-right: 2px solid #000;
}

tbody tr:first-child td {
    border-top: 2px solid #000;
}

tbody tr:last-child td {
    border-bottom: 2px solid #000;
}

JS Fiddle demo.

This does, of course, require a browser that understands and implements the :last-child and :first-child pseudo-classes.

Add borders on <tbody>

Tags:

html

Paul H

1 Answers

David Thomas

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