[thelist] table borders

[Diane Soini]

I have a question about table borders. I hope I can explain it ok.

I'm working on an application that has several different screens with 
different types of tables that need borders (sometimes).

We want the minimal amount of html sent to the browser, so I can't put 
class attributes on every <td>.

I can't figure out a way to get odd/even row colors (using class 
attribute on <tr>, not on <td>), 1px solid color cell borders (css puts 
border in each cell, for an overall appearance of 2px, and border="1" 
attribute isn't solid) and borders that show even if a <td> is empty of 
data.

I wanted to avoid nesting tables because we offer two different 
stylesheets to choose from, and one of the styles doesn't have borders. 
Plus, it gets really hard to maintain the code with so many nested 
tables.

Any suggestions? Anything I haven't tried?