caption Element

Module

The caption element is declared by the XHTML 1.1 Tables Module

Elements in the Tables Module are:
table | caption | col | colgroup | thead | tfoot | tbody | tr | th | td

Description

The caption element can be used, as the first child of a table element only, to provide a caption for the table. You could just use a heading immediately above the table, but the caption element explicitly links that caption with that table.

You can include inline elements, such as the strong, acronym and a elements within a caption, but not block-level elements.

<table>
  <caption>Chemical Symbols and Atomic Numbers of the <em>Alkaline Earth Metals</em></caption>
  <tbody>
    <tr><th scope="col">Element</th>
        <th scope="col">Chemical Symbol</th>
        <th scope="col">Atomic Number</th>
    </tr>
    <tr><td scope="row">Beryllium</td> <td>Be</td> <td>4</td> </tr>
    <tr><td scope="row">Magnesium</td> <td>Mg</td> <td>12</td></tr>
    <tr><td scope="row">Calcium</td>   <td>Ca</td> <td>20</td></tr>
    <tr><td scope="row">Strontium</td> <td>Sr</td> <td>38</td></tr>
    <tr><td scope="row">Barium</td>    <td>Ba</td> <td>56</td></tr>
    <tr><td scope="row">Radium</td>    <td>Ra</td> <td>88</td></tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

This table is not styled using CSS and so is rendered using your browser's defaults.

The caption-side CSS property can be used to control the positioning of the caption (in those browsers which support it).

#REQUIRED Attributes

There are no #REQUIRED attributes on the caption element.

Specific Attributes

There are no specific attributes declared on the caption element.

Common Attributes

From the Core Attribute Collection

class [ type NMTOKENS ]

One or more space separated classes

id [ type ID ]

A unique identifier for the element

style [ type CDATA ], from the Style Attribute Module (deprecated)

Element-specific styles

title [ type Text ]

Descriptive title for the element (in some user agents this may appear as a "tooltip" when the mouse hovers over the element)

xmlns [ type URI - #FIXED 'http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' ]

XML namespace

From the I18N Attribute Collection

dir [ type Enumeration (ltr | rtl) ], from the Bi-directional Text Module

Left-to-right or right-to-left directionality

xml:lang [ type LanguageCode ]

A language code for the element

From the Events Attribute Collection

All attributes in the Events Attribute Collection are supported:
onclick, ondblclick, onmousedown, onmouseup, onmouseover, onmousemove, onmouseout, onkeypress, onkeydown, onkeyup

Content Model

( #PCDATA | Inline.mix )*

See Content Model & Nesting for information about Content Model syntax and Nesting Groups.

Valid children of caption

• #PCDATA
• From the Text Module: abbr, acronym, br, cite, code, dfn, em, kbd, q, samp, span, strong, var
• From the Hypertext Module: a
• From the Forms Module: button, input, label, select, textarea
• From the Images Module: img
• From the Presentation Module: b, big, i, small, sub, sup, tt
• From the Client-side Image Map Module: map
• From the Scripting Module: noscript, script
• From the Edit Module: del, ins
• From the Bi-directional Text Module: bdo
• From the Object Module: object
• From the Ruby Annotation Module: ruby

Valid parents of caption

• From the Tables Module: table