Using Divs Inside Tables

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Chris Coyier on (Updated on )

Despite their status as mortal enemies, divs and tables can work together if you need them to. Because of the ability to use vertical centering in tables, it is a somewhat popular technique to use a single-celled table with both horizontal and vertical centering to absolutely center your page content in a browser window (mostly only useful for fixed-size content).

One important thing to remember when putting a div inside of a table is that the div needs to live inside of a particular table cell, meaning inside of a td or th element which is inside of a tr element.

To see what I mean, take a look at a table like this:

<table border=1 width=200 cellpadding=10>
  <tr>
    <td>
      <p>I'm text in a cell.</p>
    </td>
    <td>
      <p>I'm text in a cell.</p>
    </td>
    <td>
      <p>I'm text in a cell.</p>
    </td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>
      <p>I'm text in a cell.</p>
    </td>
    <td>
      <p>I'm text in a cell.</p>
    </td>
    <td>
      <p>I'm text in a cell.</p>
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>

tablediv1.png

Now you want to add another row to this table and put a div inside it, you might do this:

<table border=1 width=200 cellpadding=10>
  <tr>
    <td>
      <p>I'm text in a cell.</p>
    </td>
    <td>
      <p>I'm text in a cell.</p>
    </td>
    <td>
      <p>I'm text in a cell.</p>
    </td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>
      <p>I'm text in a cell.</p>
    </td>
    <td>
      <p>I'm text in a cell.</p>
    </td>
    <td>
      <p>I'm text in a cell.</p>
    </td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <div id="my_box">
      <p>I'm text in a div.</p>
    </div>
  </tr>
</table>

But that breaks the layout! Strange but true. See below:

tablediv2.png

What you need to do is make sure the div is inside an actual table cell, a td or th element, so do that:

<tr>
  <td colspan=3>
    <div id="my_box">
      <p>I'm text in a div.</p>
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

And you should get what you are expecting, a fully style-able div inside a table:

tablediv3.png

This can help with using absolute positioning inside of table cells as well. See this article.