I have had a few people ask me, “How come when I create a table and set the border parameter to 1 it doesn’t actually display any borders?” Well, the answer is usually that there may be some CSS that overwrites that parameter by establishing a style that removes all borders from tables. Luckily, there is an easy solution.

Let’s take a look at some examples.

Adding something like this:

table { border: 1px solid #000; }

will only add a border around the table. You would then need something like this:

table td, table th { border: 1px solid #000; }

That will add borders around your th cells and your td cells, but now you will probably have your borders doubling up. It might look something like this:

Here I added some cellspacing so you can see all the borders:

In order to get the table border back to the way it would have been if border=”1″ would have worked requires an extra style in your CSS.

table { border-collapse: collapse; }

Now your table should look like this:

Read a bit more about it here.