Good CSS table theming tool?

Question

It's been a long time since I've styled a table. I've got three different tables I need to style that all are going to use the same basic colors etc, but are all different shapes/sizes.

I'm wondering if anyone knows a good library or tool for generating nice html/css tables from JSON or something (you feed some JS or PHP a data structure, JSON or Arrays, and it spits out an HTML/CSS table)? Yes, I'm using them for tabular data (they are pricing sheets). Or if there is a good non-table driven alternative for displaying tabular data, I'm all ears...

Here's an example of what the background portion of the table is going to look like. Each table is going to have a different statically "highlighted" column (or none at all); this is not a hover effect, just a called out column.

Answer 1

Here's another try: http://jsfiddle.net/wwntH/4/

Answer 2

This is my attempt http://jsfiddle.net/WsheP/

/* you may play with this in javascript to achieve your hover highlight */
table td:nth-child(2) {
   background-color: #f5772e;
   border-left: 2px solid #888;
   border-right: 2px solid #888;
 } 

OR take a look to this plugin for the column highlight on hover.

Notes: you'll need to add a texture to the th to match yours, and suit the gradients to your need.