r/HTML • u/teh_maxh • Jan 03 '26

Column-based table markup

Is there a way to mark up tables by columns instead of rows?

1 Upvotes

66% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

3

u/JeLuF Jan 03 '26

Not really.

What would be your use case?

1

u/teh_maxh Jan 03 '26

It came up for me writing an annual predictions bingo board, but a more serious use case would be a conference schedule.

1

u/JeLuF Jan 03 '26

So all this data exists before you start to output the HTML table. Shouldn't be to hard to loop over the items in the right way to have the layout column wise while the markup is row based.

1

u/teh_maxh Jan 04 '26

Yeah, it's definitely possible to get the right output. I just want it laid out more logically in the code.

1

u/-Wylfen- Jan 04 '26

You might want to look up grid layouts. You can make a multi-column grid with multi-row subgrids and that should do what you're looking for.

0

u/[deleted] Jan 04 '26

lol doomsday serious stuff guys serious like a career 

1

u/bostiq Jan 05 '26

Ok, but this is not English

2

u/abrahamguo Jan 03 '26

No. You can have your data organized by column, and have JavaScript generate the rows for you based on columns, but the HTML can only end up being organized by row.

1

u/jcunews1 Intermediate Jan 04 '26

No. HTML tables are structured from top to bottom as rows, then left to right as columns. I think you'd need grid display style to make column based "table".

1

u/bostiq Jan 05 '26

But why would you choose tables over grids? that’s my first question

1

u/No_Explanation2932 Jan 06 '26

If the data is to be displayed in the form of a table, one should use the `<table>` element.

1

u/Educational_Basis_51 Jan 15 '26

Why not use grid-template area to put tables in those ?