Simple (hopefully) Table question

[Gwen Morse]

I'd like to alternate the rows in a table between having a shaded
background and being transparent to the background.

It's a table of people's names, phone numbers, and beeper numbers. So,
by having alternate rows be shaded, it will make it easier to read
which number in the leftmost column belongs to the name in the
rightmost column.

Are there basic html tags to allow shading alternate rows by the whole
table, rather than setting each one by hand? By that, I mean that
people move into and out of the group at a fairly good rate, so, is
there a tag I can put that covers the "whole" table and says
"alternate background effects in these rows" rather than hand-setting
the color of each background row?

I'm sure this could be handled by CGI, but, I'm looking for non-CGI
options to start.

Gwen

[David Dorward]

Gwen Morse wrote:

I'd like to alternate the rows in a table between having a shaded
background and being transparent to the background. Are there basic html tags to allow shading alternate rows by the whole
table, rather than setting each one by hand?

No, and there shouldn't be. This is a presentational issue and therefore the
job of CSS. Unfortunatly CSS doesn't have anything that can alternative
styles (at least no yet), so you are limited to either using a lot of +
styles ( tr {} tr + tr {} tr + tr + tr {} etc ) which aren't supported by
MSIE, or giving class to every other <tr> element in the document.

--
David Dorward http://dorward.me.uk/

[Stephen Poley]

On Sun, 05 Oct 2003 23:50:30 -0400, Gwen Morse <go******@geocities.com>
wrote:

I'd like to alternate the rows in a table between having a shaded
background and being transparent to the background.

It's a table of people's names, phone numbers, and beeper numbers. So,
by having alternate rows be shaded, it will make it easier to read
which number in the leftmost column belongs to the name in the
rightmost column.

Are there basic html tags to allow shading alternate rows by the whole
table, rather than setting each one by hand? By that, I mean that
people move into and out of the group at a fairly good rate, so, is
there a tag I can put that covers the "whole" table and says
"alternate background effects in these rows" rather than hand-setting
the color of each background row?

I'm sure this could be handled by CGI, but, I'm looking for non-CGI
options to start.

As David has said, this can't be handled by HTML/CSS. If you will be
updating the table rather often, so that hand-editing is a nuisance, you
could have a look at batch editors such as sed. Writing a sed script to
do this sort of thing is a little fiddly (though it doesn't take long
once you've got used to using the 'x' command), but a lot less work than
setting up a server-side programming environment if you don't already
have one.

OTOH if you already have PHP available, that's probably the way to go.

--
Stephen Poley

http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/

[Stan Brown]

In article <4a********************************@4ax.com> in
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html, Gwen Morse
<go******@geocities.com> wrote:

Are there basic html tags to allow shading alternate rows by the whole
table, rather than setting each one by hand?

No.

Either specify bgcolor in each td (_not_ tr), which is deprecated,
or set up some CSS (which _can_ be applied to rows).

Example -- in your HTML:

<table class="striped">
<tr><td ... ... </tr>
<tr class="otherstripe"><td ... ... </tr>
<tr><td ... ... </tr>
<tr class="otherstripe"><td ... ... </tr>
....
</table>

and then in your CSS file:

table.striped tr td {color:#000; background-color:#C33}
table.striped tr.otherstripe td {color:#000; background-color:#3C3}

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
2.1 changes: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/changes.html
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/