When designing an internet application that must provide results in a grid, many developers will use small (1 pixel by 1 pixel) images in order to create a grid effect (similar to an Excel spreadsheet). An easier way to accomplish this task is to use nested tables.

By combining two levels of tables, you can effectively create a grid effect. Also, you’ll be reducing the chance that the image is unavailable for download and that you’ll have to repeatedly code the image tag and attributes.

In the first table, set the cellpadding and cellspacing attributes equal to zero and define a bgcolor?the color of the grid. In the nested table, set the cellpadding attribute to whatever you like, but use the cellspacing attribute to define the width of the grid lines. For example, cellspacing=1 will have small grid lines, while cellspacing=5 will have large grid lines.

Here’s an example using nested tables:

 
	
		....Data....	

Note: Tables are not rendered by the browser until the entire table is received during the download of the HTML page. Extremely large tables can take some time to render which may cause users to think that your page is slow.