CSS snippet: conditional centering of tables

First published 23 december 2006

Good way

colspan="2" style="text-align:center"

Better way

td[colspan] {text-align:center}

The first method uses inline CSS, which is considered suboptimal (hard to maintain, bigger code…). The second one uses the conditional styling feature of CSS: is a td tag contains a colspan attribute (whatever is its value), then the content should be centered.

For more information on this, check the free Chapter 2 of Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition.

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