Question

I’d like to have a group of table entries using the collapse setting but to have it separate from other groups. Do I have to make a new table for each of these “zones”? I tried that and they don’t line up. And they don’t collapse together the right way when I just apply border-collapse on the th and td in my CSS.

Ascii art time.

<!-- table with two rows two columns with first one having colspan=2: -->
┌────────┐
|  abcd  │
├───┬────┤
| a | bc |
└───┴────┘

<!-- Same table, separate looks like this (but more squished because there arent enough unicode table characters for this) -->
┌─────────┐
|  abcd   │
└─────────┘ <-- this bit is squished together
┌───┐┌────┐
| a || bc |
└───┘└────┘

And what I want is something like this where I’ve got arbitrary control of whether they get collapsed or not:

<!-- this table is made of two rows. two <td colspan=2> in the first row. four <td> in the second row. The third and fourth ones are to be separate. The rest collapse their borders. -->
┌────────┬─────────────┐
|  abcd  │     efg     |
├───┬────┼─────────────┘  <--- again, here the hh and ijk borders should be separate but rising to fill that space
|   |    |┌──┐┌───────┐
| a | bc ||hh||  ijk  | 
|   |    |└──┘└───────┘     
└───┴────┘

where you can see that I’ve got hh and ijk as clearly separate, but the rest are collapsed together.

The problem with putting them into zones which are their own tables, is that the tables no longer share alignments. It makes things not line up in the table any more (how could I expect it to?) but it is a deal-breaker because my data will no longer be organized.

Answer 1

I’m pretty sure that isn’t possible with a table. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.
I’ve tried using margin: and cellspacing= but they both don’t work properly.