Can You Control Text Alignment in HTML Table Colgroups?

Text Alignment in HTML Table Colgroups

In order to maintain consistency within table elements, colgroups are frequently employed to uniformly style all cells within a specified column. While colgroups effectively control aspects like background color, text alignment remains inaccessible through this method.

Let's consider the following example:

<code class="html"><table id="myTable" cellspacing="5">
    <colgroup id="names"></colgroup>
    <colgroup id="col20" class="datacol"></colgroup>
    <colgroup id="col19" class="datacol"></colgroup>
    <colgroup id="col18" class="datacol"></colgroup>

    <thead>
        <th> </th>
        <th>20</th>
        <th>19</th>
        <th>18</th>
    </thead>
    <tbody>
        <tr>
            <td> </td>
            <td> </td>
            <td> </td>
            <td> </td>
        </tr>
    </tbody>
</table></code>

<code class="css">#names {
    width: 200px;
}

#myTable .datacol {
    text-align: center;
    background-color: red;
}</code>

As demonstrated in the CSS code, assigning "text-align: center" to the "datacol" class does not yield expected results. This is because columns have limited CSS property applicability, excluding text alignment.

To rectify this issue, the following CSS rules can be implemented:

<code class="css">#myTable tbody td { text-align: center }
#myTable tbody td:first-child { text-align: left }</code>

This adjustment aligns all table cells centrally, with the exception of the first column, which remains left-aligned. Notably, this workaround is not compatible with IE6, where text alignment erroneously applies to columns despite its incompatibility.

Additionally, the provided HTML code contains an invalid element structure. The section is missing the required tag.

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