The Elements of Table Styles
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During the wee early days of the Web, my coauthor Glenn Fleishman and I had no choice but to build tables with our bare hands. Since there weren't any graphical HTML editors on the market (heck, there was no market), we laboriously hand-coded thousands of <TR> and <TD> table tags, working in an old shoe that had no heat during blizzards every day of the year.
Obviously, things have improved somewhat since those formative years. Although programs like Adobe GoLive removed the need for hand-coding the HTML, tables can still be time consuming to edit and tweak while you're working on a Web project. This is especially true when you're prototyping ideas and need to move quickly. To save time and frustration, GoLive 5 introduced Table styles, a tool for applying cell and row colors, text formatting, and other information with a single click. Luxury!
GoLive's table style control appears in the new Table palette, a floating window that enables you to easily select cells using a small table proxy (see Figure 1). Switching to the Style tab reveals a popup menu of prefabricated styles plus a representation of the current style. To use one of these styles, simply choose it from the popup menu and click the Apply button (see Figure 2). Really, that's all there is to it -- it would take you longer to figure out how much time you just saved.
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Applying prefab styles is all well and good, but it's more likely that you have your own styles to impose upon your pages. In this case, defining a new style involves only a little more work.