 | Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide |  |
Wednesday 19th of June 2013 10:33:22 AM
Perhaps as a result of a generic need to be able to describe table layout -- something CSS1 lacks -- CSS2 includes a handful of features that apply directly to tables and table cells. First, there are 10 new table-related values for display:
table inline-table table-column-group table-column table-row-group table-row table-cell table-caption table-header-group table-footer-group
While the effects of most of these are obvious from their names, at least two may not be familiar to you. table-header-group and table-footer-group are used to mark the header and footer of a table. These are displayed, respectively, above or below all the rows of the table, but not outside of the table's caption.
Another interesting effect is that you can align text on a character by using the text-align property. For example, if you wanted to line up a column of figures on a decimal point, you might declare:
TD { text-align: "." }As long as a set of cells are grouped into a column, their content will be aligned so that the periods all line up along a vertical axis.
Far from relying on existing properties, CSS2 provides a whole array of brand-new properties in the table section. Here are a few of them:
border-spacing, which influences the placement of borders around cells
the initial containing block) is established by the user agent. In HTML, the root element is the HTML element, although some browsers may incorrectly use BODY.For nonroot elements that are not absolutely positioned, the containing block for an element is set as the content edge of the nearest block-level ancestor. This is true even in relative positioning, although it might not seem so at first.
border-collapse, which can be used to influence how the borders of various table elements interact
table-layout, which tells the browser whether or not it can resize the table as necessary
There are also properties describing how visibility and vertical-align are applied to tables. There is also a caption-side property, which functions exactly the same as the ALIGN attribute on the <CAPTION> tag, and the property speak-header-cell, which controls how header cells are handled by speech-generating browsers (more on that later).
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| 10.6. Borders |  | 10.8. Media Types and @-rules |
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bug in Navigator 4.x, which interprets it asblack.
Web-based applications are similar to app servers, except for one thing: Web-based applications don't have client apps, instead they use web browsers on the client side. They generate their front ends using HTML, which is dynamically generated by the web-based app. In the Java world, Servlets are best suited for this job.
Web-based apps might themselves rely on another app server to gather information that is presented on the client web browser. Also, you can write Servlets that get information from remote or local databases, XML document repositories and even other Servlets. One good use for web-based apps is to be a wrapper around an app server, so that you can allow your customers to access at least part of the services offered by your app server via a simple web browser. So web-based apps allow you to integrate many components including app servers, and provide access to this information over the web via a simple web browser.