Two titillating table tips

Written by Harry Roberts on CSS Wizardry.

Yesterday I was taught two awesome little <table> tips from two friends, Steve Melrose and Jon ‘Barry Crayon’ Cotton. I can’t believe I never knew about these two, they’re so simple but really cool*

*The tips are simple, not Steve and Jon.

The first, which Steve alerted me to, is colspan="0" and rowspan="0" which basically just makes the cell (<td>/<th>) to which it is applied span all the columns/rows between itself and the end/bottom of the table respectively.

I tweeted about how cool this was when Jon replied with info about colspan="100%"/rowspan="100%" which is similar to the above but instead of meaning ‘the rest of’ it just means ‘all of’. This is great if you want a cell to always span the whole width/height of a table but you don’t always know how large that table will be.

See my fiddle!

As far as I can tell Firefox is the only browser that supports [col|row]span="0" but all browsers seem to support [col|row]span="100%". I’ve not been able to do any more thorough browser testing but if anyone can feed back that’d be great!

By Harry Roberts

Harry Roberts is an independent consultant web performance engineer. He helps companies of all shapes and sizes find and fix site speed issues.

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