align Attribute

Where to use the align Attribute

• As Type Enumeration (left | center | right | justify | char):
  align is declared on the elements: col, colgroup, thead, tfoot, tbody, tr, th, td

Description

The align attribute specifies the horizontal alignment (or justification) of data within table cells.

Possible values are "left", "center", "right", "justify" and "char" (although neither "justify" nor "char" is available in the *W3C XHTML 1.1 Basic Tables Module).

left

Left-align cell contents

center

Horizontally centre cell contents

right

Right-align cell contents

justify

Justify cell contents (alter word spacing so that both left and right edges of text are aligned) - sometimes called "double justification"

char

Align cell contents at a particular character, specified by the char attribute. I do not know of any browsers which currently support this alignment setting.

In general, although the align attribute is widely supported (except on col and colgroup elements) it is probably best to use the CSS (the text-align property) instead, in order to separate content from presentation.

Note, however, that this CSS alternative is not permitted by the CSS2 Specification when used on col or colgroup elements. This means that each individual cell within a column must be aligned separately to achieve the desired appearance in any user agents (most notably Firefox) which do not support the align attribute on col or colgroup. In fact, the only CSS properties which may be used when styling col or colgroup elements are: width, background, border and visibility. Ref: *CSS2 Specification: Column selectors.

See also the valign attribute.