Div usage in tables in HTML/CSS? - html

Question

I'm trying to write some HTML/CSS to display a certain row with some of the elements left-aligned and some of them in the center. This was my HTML code:
<tr class="mainInfo" id="header">
<td> Item </td>
<td> Color </td>
<td> Size </td>
<div class="mid">
<td> Subtotal </td>
<td> Tax </td>
<td> Total </td>
</div>
</tr>
And this is my CSS code:
.mid {
text-align: center;
}
.mainInfo {
font: bold 13px Tahoma;
}
#header {
background-color: #68891;
color: white;
}
But the last three elements are not moving to the center, and I really don't understand why not. I tried putting class="mid" in the <td> tags and that worked, but doesn't that defeat the purpose of DRY?
Fiddle Demo

Answer 1

You cannot put a div instead of td element.
You should validate your HTML code with w3 validator.
If you'll do so you'll see you get this error message:
document type does not allow element "DIV" here; missing one of "TH", "TD" start-tag
Maybe you can do it this way:
<table>
<tr class="mainInfo" id="header">
<td> Item </td>
<td> Color </td>
<td> Size </td>
<td class="center">Subtotal</td>
<td class="center">Tax</td>
<td class="center">Total</td>
</tr>
</table>
JSFiddle example

Answer 2

No, you should not put divs inside tr's or tables.
And you should not use tr's or td's without table-element.
<table>
<tr>
<td>hello world</td>
<!-- This is bare minimum to use tables properly -->
</tr>
</table>
You can insert whatever(not tr or td, but could start new table) you want inside TD-elements though.
It's possible to use other elements to replace these standard ones with css display-property set to table-row etc., but you should stick to conventional tags.
Use colspan/rowspan to span over multiple table columns or rows.

Answer 3

CSS classes are designed to be used as often you need/want to. Only IDs should appear once per page.
Of course you should always keep the DRY concept in mind but in your case it's totally fine. It wouldn't if you would set your .mid class to every <td> because in that case you could just set the properties directly to the <td> element.

Answer 4

middle is not a valid value for text-align, so I'm going to assume, in your CSS, that's meant to be vertical-align. If so, it's because vertical-align will only apply to table cells, not divs - that would explain why it is only being successfully applied to your tds.
Additionally, you shouldn't really put a div inside a table (and shouldn't put a td inside of that) but that's not related to your problem.

Answer 5

Assign one class for left alignment and other for center like so...
.left {
text-align:left;
}
.center {
text-align:center;
}
Asign class to TD elements
<tr class="mainInfo" id="header">
<td class='left'> Item </td>
<td class='center'> Color </td>
</tr>