HTML attribute bgcolor is deprecated: What To Use Instead?

Question

VStudio ASP.NET gives the following message:

Attribute 'bgcolor' is considered outdated. A newer construct is recommended.

What is the recommended construct?

bgcolor is within a <td> element.
Another related message is :

Attribute 'bordercolor' is not a valid attribute of element 'table'.  

Does anyone know where I might find the newer replacements?

Answer 1

BGColor was deprecated in the W3C HTML 4.0 Specification.

Newer Web sites and web applications use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to render the same thing, as follows:

   body {
  background-color : #ffffff;
}

For tables, do the following:

<table>

<tr id="row1">
   <th>Header 1</th>      <td>Cell 1</td>        <td>Cell 2</td>
</tr>
<tr id="row2">
   <th>Header 2</th>      <td>Cell 3</td>        <td>Cell 4</td>
</tr>
<tr id="row3">
   <th>Header 3</th>      <td>Cell 5</td>        <td>Cell 6</td>
</tr>
</table>

And in your CSS:

th { text-align: center; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline }

td { vertical-align: middle  }

table  { border-collapse: collapse; background-color: #ffffff }
tr#row1 { border-top: 3px solid blue }
tr#row2 { border-top: 1px solid black }
tr#row3 { border-top: 1px solid black }

That will make it so the table will have a background color, and do different stuff with the rest of the table data/table rows.

Simply put that in your style sheet and reference it on your web page like so:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" TYPE="text/css" media="screen">

You can put just about whatever you like in your CSS, more information on CSS here, and here.

Answer 2

Best guess would be CSS's background-color and border-color:

<table style="border-color: #ffffff;">

<td style="background-color: #000000;">