Most web pages have text going from the extreme right side of the page all the way to the extreme left. This text serves as an example of that.

While there is no hard and fast rule that says you can't do this, many web style guides recommend creating right and left margins to make your page look a little more like a printed page. There's a very easy way to do this using tables.

Adding Right and Left Margins: Visible Table

All of the text, links, graphics, etc for the page would go here. As you can see, the text is no longer extending all the way to both edges of the page. This is done using a table with one row but three data cells. The first and third are empty. They keep text away from the left and right edges of the page. The middle cell is where all of the page content (text, graphics, etc) would go. The three cells have widths of 10%, 70%, and 10%. This doesn't add up to 100% but that's actually OK.


Adding Right and Left Margins: Invisible table

In this example, I've decided to place the heading shown above within the middle table cell. It just looks better that way.
Again, there's no way of telling that we used a table to create these margins. The page looks very natural. So again we have a table with one row, three data cells. The first creates the left margin. The second is where the page content goes (where I'm typing right now) and the third creates the right margin.
Please return to the TableTricks Tutorial so we can take a look at the code.