text alignment within tables with css

[Lee34]

Hi, I am pretty new to css and I am having a problem or two with aligning text within tables that I was hoping someone might be able to help me with. Firstly, can you set the margins for tables so there is a gap around all the text within the tables? I have been playing around with some css but the margin attributes within my table section dosent seem to work. Here is the code I have so far :

body {
	  font-size: 8pt;
	  font-family: "Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif";
	  color: white;
	  background: "#000033";
	  line-height: 4pt;
	  text-align: center;
	  margin-left: 10pt;
	  margin-right: 10pt;
	  margin-top: 10pt;
	  scrollbar-3dlight-color: "#000033"; 
	  scrollbar-arrow-color: "#000033";
	  scrollbar-base-color: "#006699";
	  }

td  {  
    font-size: 8pt;
    font-family: "Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif";
    color: white;
    line-height: 4pt;
    text-align: left;
    margin-left: 10pt;
    margin-right: 10pt;
    margin-top: 10pt;
    }

a:link, a:active {
		 text-decoration: none;
		 color: "#FF9900";
		 }
a:visited {color: "FFCC00";}
a:hover {color: blue;}

some of the code within the td part works but the margins dont. Also one other thing, is it possible to vertically align the text within a table using css?

[isotope235]

To create some whitespace between the text & the cell border try using the padding property instead of margin.
To position the text to the top w/ CSS you would have to absolutly position the text within the cell using position:top, left etc. Probably easier just to use the HTML valign="top" method in this case.

HTH

[mattjacob]

In CSS, padding is equivalent to cellpadding (when applied to table data elements), but there's nothing I know of yet to replace cellspacing. As for the vertical alignment, of course there is! Use this:

td {
  vertical-align: top;
}

[Lee34]

Thanks for the help guys, much appreciated

[isotope235]

Huh,

Vertical-align. How did I miss that one?

Thanks for the tip colon.

The CSS equivalent of cellspacing is the border-spacing prop.

[mattjacob]

Ah, of course! You just taught me something new, as well.