I'm wondering if someone can point me to a really good advanced table styling tutorial of some kind. I'm a self-taught web designer who only works on the pages for my own business site. I make pretty broad use of CSS in my pages. However, I find that in the instances where I feel compelled to use tables to control my layouts, I end up with an admixture of CSS classes plus inline styling applied to various table elements which produce odd results. For example, I've got padding that smears TD content past table boundaries and I'm realizing that I just don't have a solid enough understanding of how it all interacts.

So, I could start posting examples and try to fix one problem at a time, but I thought it might be better in the long run to see if I can actually come to a more comprehensive understanding of how to do it right.

Thanks - JAY

I like your approach, but I wonder if you take it from the right end. With the advent of CSS, table based layouts are out, to only use them when dealing with tabular data. See Tables (layout) and Tables (data). They also might help you to get a better understanding.

I've been takin' it in the right end, I'll tell you that! (rimshot) But seriously, folks...

I hate using tables for layout and have tried to avoid that for years now. However, I have been unable to overcome some problems in IE6 where my div-based layouts come apart when the browser window is too small. I even hired a guy to try and fix that for me. Guess what he did: Put the problem divs inside a table...

If I can learn how to troubleshoot that without resorting to tables, even better! Either way, though, I'm kind of handcuffed by the random way I've learned how to design.

The links to the lists of links you included are somewhat daunting. I'm sure there's a lot of great info in there but I'm not sure where to start.

I don't think you'll find a tutorial of the kind you want. There are tutorials on how to style tables, sure, but they are about data tables, not layout tables.

Either you stay with tables ot ditch them, the answer is probably to learn more about CSS.

Agreed.

So any suggestions about where to start? Are there a couple of good lessons in that list of links or something else that you can recommend? I guess that a more comprehensive understanding of the ins, outs, and quirks of positioning divs would be a good first step for me.

I suspected positioning was a part of it. Start with asking yourself if you need to position something before you do it...

I'm sorry, I can't say where you should start. I think it's a matter of reading and trying until the bits fall into place for everyone.