Question

To my surprise I just found out that applying text-alignment to a table column is fairly bad supported in current browsers. Neither Firefox 3.5.2, Safari 4.0.3 or IE8 shows the “amount” column below as right aligned.

HTML:

<table class="full_width">
  <caption>Listing employees of department X</caption>
  <col></col>
  <col></col>
  <col></col>
  <col class="amount" width="180"></col>
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <th>Name</th>
      <th>Phone number</th>
      <th>Email</th>
      <th>Salary</th>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>John Doe</td>
      <td>[phone]</td>
      <td>[e-mail]</td>
      <td>20000</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

CSS

.amount{
  text-align: right;
}

Why isn’t this working? Also I tried (via firebug) to turn off Firefox’ native rule that left-aligns TD elements, but that didn’t work either.

I can see that setting background color rule in the amount css class actually works. So I know that the .amount class is applied to all columns:

CSS

.amount{
  text-align: right;
  background-color: aqua;
}

The CSS 2 spec apparently says that only four attributes are supported by col element — see Why is styling table columns not allowed?

Criteria for selecting the best solution: must be supported fairly cross-browser (not necessarily in IE6 where I could live with using jquery or a conditional comment to include a specific solution). Also, I expect to apply multiple classes multiple different columns (ie. class="amount before_tax")

I’d hate to set classes on the relevant td in each row. What are my options?

Answer 1

I’d hate to set classes on the
relevant td in each row. What are my
options?

That would be it: class on each td.