Please explain rowspan and colspan, col and colgroup

Question

Can anyone explain rowspan and colspan, col and colgroup? And are these W3C valid and semantically correct? Under which circu

Answer 1

colspan

  

    
people are...
  
  

    
monkeys
    
donkeys
  

rowspan

  

    
monkeys are...
    
... real monkeys
  
  

    
... 'unreal' monkeys (people...)
  

w3c

as you see, this is for connecting table-cells - and because this is sometimes neccessary, it's valid (RegDwights links will give more information...).

col/colgroup

colgroup and col are used to set attributes to every line in the table (so you don't have to write width="80" for the first td in every line(tr)):

  
    
    
    
  
  

    
first line, first column
    
first line, second column
    
first line, third column
  
  

you can also group the cols, lets say the first and second column should get a with of 80, the third should get 320:

  
  
  

    
first line, first column
    
first line, second column
    
first line, third column