Introduction

Chapter 3 covered many techniques for solving user interface problems. This chapter focuses specifically on ways to use HTML tables to solve a number of presentation-related problems.

The chapter starts by showing you some clever ways of using tables for simple histogram-style bar charts. The techniques in these recipes can liven data reporting web pages without relying on complex graphics generation.

A number of recipes discuss problems and solutions applicable to displaying tabular data in a grid. The recipes will show you how to alternate row colors in tables for improved readability, sort the displayed by clicking on a table header, and separate rows of data onto separate pages. You will find a recipe that combines all of these features using an easy-to-use open source tag library.