Defining a Simple Table in HTML

The old school sample you saw in Exercise 3-9 used a few attributes (dimensions) to define a very basic style for the table defined in the markup. In contrast to that, HTML5 explicitly separates the content of a table from its style.

The tags defining the structure of your table focus on the content and layout, and you must use separate styling rules to establish the visual properties of the tabular data. HTML5 allows you to use simple cell semantics, or compound table semantics.