HTML <td> element

The <td> element defines a standard data cell in a table — one value belonging to a particular row and column, as opposed to a <th>, which labels a row or column rather than holding one of its values.

A <td> must appear inside a <tr>. It can contain ordinary flow content — text, links, images, even another table — not just plain text.

The colspan attribute specifies how many columns a cell occupies, from 1 to 1000. The rowspan attribute specifies how many rows it occupies, from 1 to 65534; the special value 0 extends it through the remaining rows of its row group. Both default to 1. Spanning cells must not overlap other cells or cross row-group boundaries.

An empty <td> is valid and renders as a blank cell — useful for genuinely empty data, but worth double-checking against colspan/rowspan on neighbouring rows before assuming a table is broken just because a cell looks blank.

The headers attribute lists the IDs of associated <th> cells in the same table, separated by spaces. For example, headers="ada html-score" explicitly associates a score with those two headings. This is useful for complex tables; simple row and column headings can usually be expressed with scope on their header cells.

The example below uses colspan="2" for a result that applies to both subjects. That row needs just one data cell after its name heading because the data cell occupies both score columns.

Attributes: colspan, rowspan, headers, GLOBALS.

Typical layout:
<table>
  <caption>Workshop scores</caption>
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <th scope="col">Name</th>
      <th scope="col">HTML</th>
      <th scope="col">CSS</th>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <th scope="row">Ada</th>
      <td colspan="2">Awaiting results</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

Visual representation: