The proposals for specifying which headers are relevant to each cell are designed to allow these headers to be grouped and for these groups to be ranked. This is intended to give implementors the freedom to treat the table as a hierarchy that is independent of the visual layout chosen for windows based browsers. The idea is to allow large and complex tables to be browsed in a similar way to browsing file system directories, with the ability to hide or expose levels of detail. The scope attribute allows authors to state whether a given header applies to the current row, column, row group or column group. This takes advantage of new table features in HTML 4.0 for specifying column properties and for grouping rows and columns.
Scope works well for most simple tables.
The first row contains column headers. The abbr attribute is used to provide an abbreviation for longer headers. The course will examine the turbulent years in England after 1646. The TD element is used to markup each data cell. The first cell in the column gives the course name.