• Rectangular 2-dimensional grid
• Content-determined vertically
  • Anticipation is that look-up into table is via a row
  • Anticipation is that like things are in columns
• Contiguous set of rows can be grouped with optional headers and footers
• Headers and footers appear on every page of a printed table
  • The motivation behind thead and tfoot
  • and totally inappropriate for the Web!
• A table cell is the intersection of a row and a column
• So the table model for the Web is based on a system for very large paper-based tables for the US Navy (just like XML)!

Designed for large complex tables spanning many printed pages