FAQ: Learn HTML - Tables - Rowspan

This community-built FAQ covers the “Spanning Rows” exercise in Codecademy’s lessons on HTML.

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Why don’t the table heading elements in the example table given for this exercise include scope attributes?

4 Likes

2 posts were split to a new topic: What code editor should I use?

Can you use colspan and rowspan in the same

tag?
4 Likes

When I increased the rowspan attribute it appeared to also increase the height size of the other rows as well–is this standard or just in the exercise?

So I tried spanning a element across 1 row vs 4 rows to see the difference like so:

  <td colspan="2">what</td>
</tr>
<tr>
  <td rowspan ="4">we are</td>
</tr>

But there was no difference and it didn’t span across 4 rows. Can anyone please tell me why?

1 Like

I have not been able to successfully get this rowspan element in without having the columns messed up or for the code to completely stop working ie. forever running loading circle. Can someone maybe explain to me why we want to firstly add a “span a <td> element across two rows.”? I don’t actually get why we are doing this. It seems to break up the table not make it better. And secondly if you can explain to me the process for this new addition to our code.
A snippet of my code:

div class=“search”>Search the table

<th>Adam's Greenworks</th>

<td rowspan="2"></td>

<th>14</th>

<th>Package Items</th>

Here’s a picture of my code and forever loading circle:
https://gyazo.com/4e5c77506af3f143074b491c9398c5a9

Company Name Number of Items to Ship Next Action
Davie's Burgers 2 Send Invoice

I think its because you’re missing enough empty rows after

for your td to occupy. I checked it in the excercise by adding

<td rowspan="4">Adam's Greenworks</td>

which then does occupy the next 4 rows

your <td> element doesn’t contain any data to span 2 rows. maybe that messes up the rendering. your code should probably look more like this:
<th scope="rowgroup">Adam's Greenworks</th>
(or <td>Adam's Greenworks</td> if you don’t want to style this as a row header and keep it as a data point instead)

<td rowspan="2">14</td>
(now the entry of 14 should occupy two rows of it’s column.)

<td>Package Items</td>

from your picture it seems you have used the <th> element almost exclusively. I don’t think that’s best practice (presumably because of semantics and later styling, I haven’t started css yet). You should probably use the <td> element for data entries and use <th> only for headers with a scope for the row or column accordingly.

Am I the only one thats bothered by the column span, spanning across a row, and the row span spanning across a column??? Who tf programmed it that way?