table

The <table> element organizes arbitrarily complex relationships of tabular information. This standard table markup allows column or row spanning and table captions or descriptions. An optional title allowed inside the table element provides a caption to describe the table. See simpletable for a simplified table model that can be specialized to represent more regular relationships of data.

The DITA table is based on the OASIS Exchange Table Model, augmented with DITA attributes which enable it for specialization, conref, and other DITA processing. In addition, the table includes a desc element, which enables table description that is parallel with figure description.

In DITA tables, in place of the expanse attribute used by other DITA elements, the pgwide attribute is used instead, to conform with the OASIS Exchange Table Model. This attribute has a similar semantic (1=page width; 0=resize to galley or column).

Note: The scale attribute represents a stylistic markup property that is maintained for now in tables for legacy purposes. External stylesheets should enable less dependency on this attribute. You should use the scale attribute judiciously in your topics.

Contains

( ( (title) (optional) then (desc) (optional) ) (optional) then (tgroup) (one or more) )

Contained by

body, section, example, p, note, lq, li, itemgroup, dd, draft-comment, conbody, prereq, context, info, tutorialinfo, stepxmp, choice, stepresult, result, postreq, refbody, refsyn, pd

Inheritance

topic/table

Attributes

Name	Description	Data Type	Default Value	Required?
scale, frame	Described at %display-atts;	parameter entity	PE not applicable	Not applicable
pgwide	Determines the horizontal placement of the element. Supported values are 1 for page width, or 0 for resize to galley or column.	(0 \| 1)	#IMPLIED	No
colsep	Column separator. A value of 0 indicates no separators; 1 indicates separators.	NMTOKEN	"0"	No
rowsep	Row separator. A value of 0 indicates no separators; 1 indicates separators.	NMTOKEN	"0"	No
rowheader	This attribute specifies whether the content of the first column in a table contains row headings. In the same way that a column header introduces a table column, the row header introduces the table row. This attribute makes tables whose first column contains row headings more readable on output. Allowable values are: firstcol The first column contains the row headings. norowheader Indicates that no column contains row headings. This is the default.	(firstCol \| norowheader)	#IMPLIED	No
%univ-atts; (%select-atts;, %id-atts;, translate, xml:lang)	A set of related attributes, described at %univ-atts;	parameter entity	PE not applicable	Not applicable
%global-atts; (xtrf, xtrc)	A set of related attributes, described at %global-atts;	parameter entity	PE not applicable	Not applicable
class, outputclass	Common attributes described in Other common DITA attributes

Example

Source:

<table>
<tgroup cols="2">
<colspec colname="COLSPEC0" colwidth="121*"/>
<colspec colname="COLSPEC1" colwidth="76*"/>
<thead>
<row>
<entry colname="COLSPEC0" valign="top">Animal</entry>
<entry colname="COLSPEC1" valign="top">Gestation</entry>
</row>
</thead>
<tbody>
<row>
<entry>Elephant (African and Asian)</entry>
<entry>19-22 months</entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry>Giraffe</entry>
<entry>15 months</entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry>Rhinoceros</entry>
<entry>14-16 months</entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry>Hippopotamus</entry>
<entry>7 1/2 months</entry>
</row>
</tbody>
</tgroup>
</table>

Formatted output:

Animal	Gestation
Elephant (African and Asian)	19-22 months
Giraffe	15 months
Rhinoceros	14-16 months
Hippopotamus	7 1/2 months