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

OASIS DITA Language Specification v1.0 -- 09 May 2005
Copyright (c) OASIS Open 2005. All Rights Reserved.