Please Provide a Simple Answer: What is the CSS equivalent of <table align="center">

[prowsej]

Please Provide a Simple Answer: I'm wondering what the CSS equivalent of <table align="center"> is. I searched Google for this and came upon this discussion which didn't seem to arrive at a clear answer:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/...7Oct/0064.html

Four years later I'm sure that there is somethign very simple, but I don't knwo what it is.

<table align="center">
<table style="?????:center">

[Anarchos]

text-align
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/text.html#alignment-prop

[prowsej]

Text-align doesn't seem to work - it centers text inside of the table and that's not what I want.

<table align="center"> makes the table itself centerd and doesn't affect the positioning of the text inside of that table.

<table style="text-align:center"> doesn't center the table (which I tried it the table was in its default position - left aligned) and the text inside of the table was centered.

What I want to do - center the table, but not the text. This is what <table align="center"> does. What is the CSS equivalent?

[Anarchos]

Ah right, margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; is what you need.

[prowsej]

Originally posted by Anarchos
Ah right, margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; is what you need.

That seems so very arcane and bizarre - like a CSS kludge. Surely within all of the table formatting specs in CSS2 there is something that explicitly defines 'center'.

I'll start using that, but I consider center something basic and I think that's a bizarre design decision on the part of the W3C. There are a lot of elements in CSS that you can explicitly center, text for one. why should tables be the exception?

[ben_washington]

I think what your trying to do is:

<style type="text/css">
<!--

table.class{align:center;}

-->
</style>

[creole]

Technically, you should be putting any content that needs centering inside a DIV tag and centering the DIV itself.

[Doug Baker]

Here are a couple of links that deal with centering block level elements using CSS.

http://bluerobot.com/web/css/center1.html
http://bluerobot.com/web/css/center2.html

bluerobot.com also has some very nice layouts that you can look at and view the stylesheets.