Fancy HTML tables with CSS

I got an email from an anonymous reader a few days ago who, after presumably reading my recent article on “pretty tables”, wanted to know if there was a way to extend the idea:

Do you know if it’s possible to change the background colour of an entire table row on a “mouseover event” without using javascript? I know how to do this using image rollovers and javascript but I’m wandering if there’s some way of doing it using CSS instead.

Well miss anonymous, the answer is yes. It is possible. By using a “hover pseudo-class” declaration for the table row and combining it with the "!important" rule, you can get the effect you’re after:

The CSS code you’ll need, preferably in a separate file:

table.fancy {
  margin: 1em 1em 1em 0;
  background: whitesmoke;
  border-collapse: collapse;
}
table.fancy tr:hover {
   background: lightsteelblue !important;
}
table.fancy th, table.fancy td {
  border: 1px silver solid;
  padding: 0.2em;
}
table.fancy th {
  background: gainsboro;
  text-align: left;
}
table.fancy caption {
  margin-left: inherit;
  margin-right: inherit;
}

The HTML code is very simple with "fancy" being the only class declaration:

<table class="fancy">
<tr>
<th>Key</th><th>Value</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>ACT</td><td>Australian Capital Territory</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>NSW</td><td>New South Wales</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>NT</td><td>Northern Territory</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>QLD</td><td>Queensland</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>SA</td><td>South Australia</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>TAS</td><td>Tasmania</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>VIC</td><td>Victoria</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>WA</td><td>Western Australia</td>
</tr>
</table>

If you’ve read the previous article, you’ll notice that both the HTML and the CSS code is identical, except that our new “fancy table” contains one additional declaration:

table.fancy tr:hover {
   background: lightsteelblue !important;
}

Easy, wasn’t it? Again, change the colours to suit your own bad taste. Of course, this won’t work in MSIE, due to it’s buggy CSS behaviour.