As you can probably guess from the title of this post, there's an excellent chance we'll come back to this topic many more times. But we have to start somewhere!
Tables in ePub are not the friendliest thing around. Not for the reader, and certainly not for the person building the book. Every table we create somehow ends up looking completely distorted in the end. Why is that?
A table is a very sophisticated HTML object, with the ability to stretch, shrink, adapt to the screen size, and plenty of centering and alignment capabilities. All of these were used for many years on the earliest websites - to arrange graphics and text across different screen resolutions - until, little by little, the problems started to surface and better, more flexible tools were needed.
In the world of HTML 4, and of course in version 5, the prevailing recommendation for clean, efficient code is no tables at all. Everything that could once be achieved with tables can now be achieved with the right CSS rules and the use of appropriate tags that allow far greater flexibility at any screen resolution.
That said, the table tag hasn't disappeared entirely, and it's supported in every existing browser. It's just that now it's used to display a table only, and not to lay out spaced-out text or sliced graphics. So if you've weighed all the right considerations, examined all the options, and finally concluded that a table really is the best solution - how do you define a table correctly? And what should you expect when using a table in ePub?
Like any reflowable text, you should expect the table to be cut off at page breaks. After all, the user enlarges the font as they wish, changes the page size as they wish, and reads on devices with different resolutions.
The default arrangement of a table is left to right, unless direction:RTL has been set on the table tag or on one of the ancestors containing the table (inheritance). For example: on this page, RTL has been set for the page itself, so the following table will be arranged from right to left:
| First cell | Second cell | Third cell |
|---|---|---|
| Jill | Smith | 50 |
| Eve | Jackson | 94 |
We can override this setting by wrapping the table in some tag that contains an LTR definition:
| First cell | Second cell | Third cell |
|---|---|---|
| Jill | Smith | 50 |
| Eve | Jackson | 94 |
So in any case, when creating tables for Hebrew, it's worth adding an RTL definition to the table tag, to avoid confusion relative to the settings of the other tags on the same page.