How to Properly Set Cellspacing and Cellpadding for HTML Tables in CSS

Here will show you the correct way to set cellspacing and cellpadding in HTML tables using just CSS rules.

It is more common than you might imagine finding web designers setting cellspacing and cellpadding to HTML tables using attributes as shown below:

<table cellspacing="10" cellpadding="10"></table>

It is not the best practice to use the above method as it is not easy to maintain for the designer or the team, also these attributes have been deprecated for a while now.

The good news is that with CSS there is a much more elegant and friendly way to set cellspacing and cellpadding in your HTML tables.

To control Cellspacing with CSS, you can apply the border-spacing CSS property to your table. Here we add the optional border-collapse CSS property to specify that the cells should have separate borders.

table { 
    border-spacing: 10px;
    border-collapse: separate;
}

As for Cellpadding, you can simply use padding on the table cells as shown below.

td { 
    padding: 10px;
}

One of the advantages when using CSS to set the cellspacing and cellpadding is that in both cases you can control the spacing of the top, right, bottom, and left sides independent of each other.

In the case of border-spacing, the spacing works in pairs, either horizontally or vertically. The following sets the horizontal space (the space between cells in adjacent columns) to 20px and the vertical space (the space between cells in adjacent rows) to 10px.

table { 
    border-spacing: 20px 10px;
    border-collapse: separate;
}

Ref: [1], [2]

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Further Reading:

When to Use Margin vs Padding in CSS CSS Box-Sizing to Stop Padding and Borders From Resizing Elements How to Add Google Fonts to Your Website How to Change font height and width in CSS and HTML Tip: Properly Display an Unordered List in HTML Without any Bullets How to Disable a Link Using Only CSS and HTML