<caption>: The Table Caption element
Baseline Widely available
This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.
The <caption>
HTML element specifies the caption (or title) of a table, providing the table an accessible description.
Try it
Attributes
This element includes the global attributes.
Deprecated attributes
The following attributes are deprecated and should not be used. They are documented below for reference when updating existing code and for historical interest only.
align
Deprecated-
Specifies on which side of the table the caption should be displayed. The possible enumerated values are
left
,top
,right
, orbottom
. Use thecaption-side
andtext-align
CSS properties instead, as this attribute is deprecated.
Usage notes
- If included, the
<caption>
element must be the first child of its parent<table>
element. - When a
<table>
is nested within a<figure>
as the figure's only content, it should be captioned via a<figcaption>
for the<figure>
instead of as a<caption>
nested within the<table>
. - Any
background-color
applied to a table will not be applied to its caption. Add abackground-color
to the<caption>
element as well if you want the same color to be behind both.
Example
See <table>
for a complete table example introducing common standards and best practices.
Table with caption
This example demonstrates a basic table that includes a caption describing the data presented.
Such a "title" is helpful for users who are quickly scanning the page, and it is especially beneficial for visually impaired users, allowing them to determine the table's relevance quickly without the need to have a screen reader read the contents of many cells just to find out what the table is about.
HTML
A <caption>
element is used as the first child of the <table>
, with text content similar to a title to describe the table data. Three rows, the first being a header row, with two columns are created using the <tr>
, <th>
and <td>
elements after the <caption>
.
<table>
<caption>
User login email addresses
</caption>
<tr>
<th>Login</th>
<th>Email</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>user1</td>
<td>[email protected]</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>user2</td>
<td>[email protected]</td>
</tr>
</table>
CSS
Some basic CSS is used to align and highlight the <caption>
.
caption {
caption-side: top;
text-align: left;
padding-bottom: 10px;
font-weight: bold;
}
Result
Technical summary
Content categories | None. |
---|---|
Permitted content | Flow content. |
Tag omission | The end tag can be omitted if the element is not immediately followed by ASCII whitespace or a comment. |
Permitted parents | A <table> element, as its first descendant. |
Implicit ARIA role | caption |
Permitted ARIA roles | No role permitted |
DOM interface | HTMLTableCaptionElement |
Specifications
Specification |
---|
HTML Standard # the-caption-element |
Browser compatibility
BCD tables only load in the browser
See also
- Learn: HTML tables
<col>
,<colgroup>
,<table>
,<tbody>
,<td>
,<tfoot>
,<th>
,<thead>
,<tr>
: Other table-related elementscaption-side
: CSS property to position the<caption>
relative to its parent<table>
text-align
: CSS property to horizontally align the text content of the<caption>