Proper html markup of table tags?

Question

kind of a silly question, but ive been seeing things such as tbody and thead/tfood tags in other peoples tables

are these required even if they're empty for good markup? or can i just leave them out?

thanks

Answer 1

They aren't required, but they let you do some more advanced things with headers and footers: http://www.htmldog.com/guides/htmladvanced/tables/

Answer 2

if you really need tables, you should use them. If you use tables only for design purposes you should switch to css-markup.

A simple correct table example:

<table>
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <td>id</td>
      <td>name</td>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>1</td>
      <td>User1</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>2</td>
      <td>User2</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

Answer 3

Yes, that is proper markup. Though they are optional You can read further on the W3Schools page.

Answer 4

Those tags are not required and a page would validate even without them.

Answer 5

The table sections (thead/tbody/tfoot) are optional. The table caption (caption) and column definitons (col/colgroup) are also optional.

In HTML (but not XHTML) the closing tag for rows and cells are also optional, so you could write a table as:

<table>
  <tr>
    <th>1
    <th>2
  <tr>
    <td>3
    <td>4
  <tr>
    <td>5
    <td>6
</table>

It's however recommended that you close the tags to get better structure in the code. It also makes it a lot easier if you decide to change to XHTML.

Answer 6

The <tbody> tag is only partially supported in all major browsers.
Tables may have multiple bodies, but when it only has one single body, the HTML tbody tag may be safely omitted.