We've compared TextEdit and Microsoft Word as HTML generators by peeking at the code with the "View Page Source" menu item in FireFox or the comparable command in any browser.

That's one way the Web was built in such a hurry, even before there were HTML books for sale. People inspected the code of pages they liked, figured out how it worked, and borrowed all the tricks they needed. Try it with this page!

"Table" trickery:
Nothing on this page looks like a spreadsheet "table" separated into lots of rows and columns... but if you peek at the HTML code behind the page, you'll discover that underneath its heading, the page has a big one-row, one-cell table. (I've given the table a color background to make it visible.)

Why do that? Because in this day of big wide monitors, it's very hard to read a line that stretches all the way across the screen -- possibly 30 words without a break. Since a table's width can be set in advance, tables became the original way to control space on a browser screen.

Tables aren't the newest of most sophisticated way to manage space on a Web page. CSS style sheets are more sophisticated and ultimately more powerful. (See various tutorials linked to the syllabus if you're getting bored with tables.) However, tables are still a little simpler to grasp, and Dreamweaver makes using them very easy. They are good enough for this course's pages.

Early Web designers discovered that even though the "table" code was intended for columns of figures, by making the table boundaries invisible, tables made it possible to control the maximum width of a page, or the placement of graphics on pages, by arranging the images in table cells, but making the table borders invisible.

For this page , I've set the width of the table to 640 pixels. Why that number? Old 14-inch monitors were 640 pixels wide, and they were a comfortable word-processor reading width. I've also given the table some "padding" so that my letters don't touch the edges of the color background.

You can use other layouts -- including multiple-column pages (like a newspaper!), but keep the column-widths readable, and keep some design consistency between your pages.