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Tables may have seemed complicated enough in the HTML Beginner Tutorial. It can be quite difficult to visualise a two-dimensional grid from one-dimensional lines of code.

Well, it gets trickier. All thanks to the rowspan and colspan attributes. Those bastards.

The following code is similar to that in the Tables page of the HTML Beginner Tutorial.

<table border=“1″>
	<tr>
		<th>Column 1 heading</th>
		<th>Column 2 heading</th>
		<th>Column 3 heading</th>
	</tr>
	<tr>
		<td>Row 2, cell 1</td>
		<td colspan=“2″>Row 2, cell 2, also spanning Row 2, cell 3</td>
	</tr>
	<tr>
		<td rowspan=“2″>Row 3, cell 1, also spanning Row 4, cell 1</td>
		<td>Row 3, cell 2</td>
		<td>Row 3, cell 3</td>
	</tr>
	<tr>
		<td>Row 4, cell 2</td>
		<td>Row 4, cell 3</td>
	</tr>
</table>

Firstly, we have replaced the td tags of the first row with th tags. Whereas a td is a standard data cell, th is a header cell. As with the td tag, these tags must be enclosed in tr tags.

We have also used colspan and rowspan attributes in some of the td tags. If you look at this code in a browser, you will see that on the second row there are now two cells instead of three, the second cell spanning the second and third column. The colspan attribute, which means ‘column span’ will span the cell over the number of cells that is specified. This means, in this example, that there is no need for a third td tag - two cells are merged into one.

The self-descriptive rowspan attribute is similar to colspan, except, obviously, it will span across rows rather than columns. Again, the cells that it spans should be removed. In this example, because it spans over the fourth row, there is only two cells in that row.

As with the simpler 3×4, 12-cell table, the numbers on these tables with merged cells should also add up. Although there are only 10 cells in this example, there are 2 spans.