Tables are the building blocks in HTML, without them it would be very difficult to arrange different elements on a web page. As a matter of fact, this paragraph is sitting in a table that is inside another table. Below is the skeleton code for a table that has 2 columns and 2 rows.

(view the source of this page for more indepth source code commentary on HTML table tags)

<table width="300" height="100" border="1" cellspacing="0"
cellpadding="0">
 <tr>
  <td align="left" valign="top" width="150" height="50">
    text or image can go here
  </td>
  <td align="left" valign="top" width="150" height="50">
    text or image can go here
  </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
  <td align="left" valign="top" width="150" height="50">
    text or image can go here
  </td>
  <td align="left" valign="top" width="150" height="50">
    text or image can go here
  </td>
 </tr>
</table>
                   

The above code would produce a table that looks like this:

One of the best things about creating your site with tables is that they easily let you align text, and images in all directions (left, right, center, middle, top, and bottom).

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View a photo gallery that shows all the possible alignment that you can make a table cells have. See how easy it is to make your own photo gallery

Another nice feature with tables is that the actual <table> tag itself as well as each of the <td> tags (which are the cell tags themselves) can have a bgcolor and a background attirbute to them. Being able to do that makes it possible to have what looks like images on top of one another and then to have text on top of that. A good example of this is the table at the top of this page that has the title of the page in big bold type saying HTML Tables. That green image is the background of the table and the text is centered in the table. View the source of this page for a more detailed explanation of how that was accomplished.