HTML Cookbook Table Course

Each cell in a row determines a column.
All cells in the same row will have the same height regardless of what is in them.

The tallest cell in any row determines the height of that row.
All cells in the same column will have the same width regardless of what is in them. Imagine that a ruler is being used to line up the edges of the cells in any one column.

The widest cell in each column determines the width of he column.
Each row in the same table must have the same number of cells.
Cellspacing "spaces" your cells apart.
Cellpadding "pads" the items that are inside your cells.

If a table or cell is smaller than a background image, only part of the image will appear, starting with the upper left corner of the image.

If a table or cell is larger than a background image, the image will tile (repeat).

Large tables can have a lot of code, but you can still build them very quickly if you copy and paste wherever possible.

For example, make one cell with all the attributes you want (align, valign, bgcolor, background, etc.), then just copy and paste to make your other cells. Go back and adjust your attributes as needed.
Different browsers have different default values for border, cellspacing and cellpadding.
It is always best to set the values you really want in every table.
Cellspacing and cellpadding must be spelled correctly to work. If your tables don't look right, check your spelling.
If you want the same bgcolor in all of the cells in a row, you can color all of the cells at once by adding your bgcolor to the <tr> tag instead of the <td> tag, like so:
<tr bgcolor="?">