Is a DIV inside a TD a bad idea

Question

It seems like I heard read somewhere that a  lt div gt  inside of a  lt td gt  was a no-no  Not that it won t work  just something about them not being really compatible based on their display type  Can t find any evidence to back up my hunch  so I may be totally wrong

User · Answer

No  Not necessarily   If you need to place a DIV within a TD  be sure you re using the TD properly  If you don t care about tabular-data  and semantics  then you ultimately won t care about DIVs in TDs  I don t think there s a problem though - if you have to do it  you re fine   According to the HTML Specification  A  lt div gt  can be placed where flow content is expected1  which is the  lt td gt  content model2

User · Answer

It breaks semantics  that s all   It works fine  but there may be screen readers or something down the road that won t enjoy processing your HTML if you  break semantics

User · Answer

Two ways of dealing with it   put div inside tbody tag put div inside tr tag   Both approaches are valid  if you see feference  https   stackoverflow com a 23440419 2305243

User · Answer

I have faced the problem by placing a  lt div gt  inside  lt td gt    I was unable to identify the div using document getElementById   if i place that inside td  But outside  it was working fine

User · Answer

As everyone mentioned  it might not be a good idea for layout purposes  I arrived to this question because I was wondering the same and I only wanted to know if it would be valid code   Since it s valid  you can use it for other purposes  For example  what I m going to use it for is to put some fancy  CSSed  divs inside table rows and then use a quick jQuery function to allow the user to sort the information by price  name  etc  This way  the only layout table will give me is the  vertical order   but I ll control width  height  background  etc of the divs by CSS

User · Answer

After checking the XHTML DTD I discovered that a  lt TD gt -element is allowed to contain block elements like headings  lists and also  lt DIV gt -elements  Thus  using a  lt DIV gt -element inside a  lt TD gt -element does not violate the XHTML standard  I m pretty sure that other modern variations of HTML have an equivalent content model for the  lt TD gt -element   Here are the relevant DTD rules    lt  ELEMENT td  Flow  gt   lt  --  Flow  mixes block and inline and is used for list items etc  -- gt   lt  ENTITY  Flow    PCDATA    block    form    inline     misc  gt   lt  ENTITY  block  p    heading    div    lists     blocktext    fieldset   table  gt

User · Answer

Using a div instide a td is not worse than any other way of using tables for layout   Some people never use tables for layout though  and I happen to be one of them    If you use a div in a td you will however get in a situation where it might be hard to predict how the elements will be sized  The default for a div is to determine its width from its parent  and the default for a table cell is to determine its size depending on the size of its content   The rules for how a div should be sized is well defined in the standards  but the rules for how a td should be sized is not as well defined  so different browsers use slightly different algorithms

User · Answer

A table-cell can legitimately contain block-level elements so it s not  inherently  a faux-pas  Browser implentation  of course  leaves this a speculative-theoretical position  It may cause layout problems and bugs   Though as tables were used for layout -and sometimes still are- I imagine that most browsers will render the content properly  Even IE

User · Answer

If you want to use position  absolute  on the div with position  relative  on the td you will run into issues  FF  safari  and chrome  mac  not PC though  will not position the div relative to the td  like you would expect  this is also true for divs with display  table-whatever  so if you want to do that you need two divs  one for the container width  100   height  100   and no border so it fills the td without any visual impact  and then the absolute one    other than that why not just split the cell

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