Tables on Blogger

Around July why and I was preparing Pheonix Union I had organized the information quite nicely in a table, but when I published it to my blog, I had a large amount of "empty" space between the top of the page and the top of my table. Frantic I pleaded with idealist to magically fix it! I do not remember what she was preoccupied with at the time, but I resigned to dismantling my table and entering the information in as a list instead.

Last night idealist was organizing Distorted Dreams and in the process decided that the information would sit well in a table. She spent all night formatting the table and entering the information in, only to have the horrifying "empty" space staring back at her upon completion. She had so much "empty" space, the table was a full two scrolls down the page! Disgruntled and disappointed she moved on to something else, but not before expressing her angst to me. She even woke me this morning to express her disappointment with the table she had spent so much time on.



I being the knight in shining armor that I am spent this morning searching for the magic word that would obliterate the "empty" space. I discoverd it here.

Quite simple really, you see Blogger automatically enters a
everytime you hit enter, even if you're editing your post under "edit html." Most people organize their data while writing html. So, when idealist and I were entering our tables, the code looked somewhat like this:

table
tbody
tr
td Row 1 Column 1 /td
td Row 2 Column 2 /td
/tr
/tbody
/table

Not realizing that all those returns where being translated into
thus the more times returned was use the more "empty" space was present. In order to get rid of the empty space, DON'T HIT ENTER! Write the table as a single string. Or write the table the way you normally would, with the returns and then go back and delete 'em.