Table Rows

The TR element acts as a container for a row of table cells defined with the TH or TD elements. You can set default horizontal and vertical alignment of cell contents for the row. You also have the ability to disable word wrap for the row, and thereafter use the <BR> element to determine line breaks and hence cell widths.

To assist with formatting tables to paged media, authors can differentiate leading and trailing rows that are to be duplicated when splitting tables across page boundaries. The recommended approach is to subclass rows using the CLASS attribute For example:

    <TABLE BORDER COLSPEC= ...>
      <TR CLASS=Header> header cells ...
      <TR CLASS=Body>   body cells ...
      <TR CLASS=Footer> footer cells ...
    </TABLE>

Paged browsers when splitting a table across a page boundary, can then insert footer rows at the bottom of the current page and header rows at the top of the next page, followed by the remaining body rows, and the footer rows. This is repeated as necessary until all of the body rows have been rendered. Refinements of this scheme can be devised by further subclassing the rows together with an appropriate style sheet.

Permitted Attributes for the TR Element

ID

An SGML identifier used as the target for hypertext links or for naming particular elements in associated style sheets. Identifiers are NAME tokens and must be unique within the scope of the current document.

LANG

This is one of the ISO standard language abbreviations, e.g. "en.uk" for the variation of English spoken in the United Kingdom. It can be used by parsers to select language specific choices for quotation marks, ligatures and hypenation rules etc. The language attribute is composed from the two letter language code from ISO 639, optionally followed by a period and a two letter country code from ISO 3166.

CLASS

This a space separated list of SGML NAME tokens and is used to subclass tag names. By convention, the class names are interpreted hierarchically, with the most general class on the left and the most specific on the right, where classes are separated by a period. The CLASS attribute is most commonly used to attach a different style to some element, but it is recommended that where practical class names should be picked on the basis of the element's semantics, as this will permit other uses, such as restricting search through documents by matching on element class names. The conventions for choosing class names are outside the scope of this specification.

ALIGN

The ALIGN attribute can be used to explicitly specify the horizontal alignment of paragraphs within a table row:

align=left

Paragraphs are rendered flush left.

align=center

Paragraphs are centered.

align=right

Paragraphs are rendered flush right.

align=justify

Text lines are justified where practical, otherwise this gives the same effect as the align=left setting.

align=decimal

Text lines are indented such that the first occurrence of a decimal point on each line are aligned vertically. If a line doesn't contain a decimal point, the line is rendered flush left for data cells and centered for header cells.

Note: By default, header cells are centered while data cells are flush left. This attribute can be used to alter these defaults on a row by row basis. If you are specifying column alignments with the TABLE's COLSPEC attribute, there is no point in also including an ALIGN attribute with the TR element, as the latter will be ignored.

DP

This specifies the character to be used for the decimal point with the ALIGN attribute, e.g. dp="." (the default) or dp=",". The default may be altered by the language context, as set by the LANG attribute on enclosing elements.

VALIGN

The VALIGN attribute can be used to explicitly specify the vertical alignment of material within a table row. It is overridden by the VALIGN attribute on individual cells:

valign=top

The cell contents appear at the top of each cell (the default).

valign=middle

Cell contents are centered vertically in each cell.

valign=bottom

The cell contents appear at the bottom of each cell.

valign=baseline

This is used when you want to ensure that all cells in the row share the same baseline. This constraint only applies to the first text line for each cell.

NOWRAP

The NOWRAP attribute is used when you don't want the browser to automatically wrap lines. You can then explicitly specify line breaks in paragrphs using the BR element.