More Eric Meyer on CSS (Voices That Matter)

The genius of capitalism consists precisely in its lack of morality. Unless he is rich enough to hire his own choir, a capitalist is a fellow who, by definition, can ill afford to believe in anything other than the doctrine of the bottom line.

LEWIS H. LAPHAM

Although we're used to thinking of the Web as a collection of personal sites, e-commerce powerhouses, fringe groups, and nuggets of information, there's a lot more going on albeit not all in the public eye. Corporate intranets, for example, are often awash in HTML-based information ranging from employee portals to Webmail interfaces and beyond.

Although an entire book could be devoted to exploring how just a sampling of this information could be styled, it will be sufficient here to examine one type of information that tends to be particular to corporate sites: a financial report showing profit and loss in a number of markets in a given quarter. We won't be seeking to replace the table markup with divs and CSS that would be silly. Since we have a table of data, it will be contained in table markup. What we'll do is add useful hooks to the structure and use those to style the table and its contents.