Are you lazy? Hate specifiying colors for each table cell? Cool! Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is just the thing for you. CSS is a way by which you can specify parameters for your tags by the bulk. When making large web pages, there tends to be information that "Vanilla" HTML forces you to write over and over despite the fact that it is repetitive.

For example, consider this example.

Note that the first column has a black background, and the second has a white one. Also note that the table has a fixed cell width of 200 pixels. Below is the code that produced the above table.

You'd notice that there's a lot of repetition in the code.

Now take a look at this. Hopefully it looks the same as the other one.

Below is the code that produced the second table; the green section is the code for the table:

The orange section might look a bit foreign--this is the style section (the CSS)which lets you choose how each rendered HTML tag is going to look. By inserting a CLASS="the .something you created in the STYLE section" on your tags will apply those properties to that element. I won't go into much about these--you can always look up CSS properties on reference sites. What you should notice is that the green section, the actual table, looks considerably cleaner. Well, you might say that you typed all that stuff in orange so it's more work--well that's not necessarily the case. What if your table is 200 rows? Writing in all those WIDTH=... COLOR=... could get very tedious. Another thing to note is that the CSS properties extend far beyond what you can control in vanilla HTML. Again, you can read about this at your favorite CSS reference site.