Admin Forum:How to change table header background colour?

I'm trying to convert an old web page of mine, listing all the 140-odd named colours recognised by web browsers, to MediaWiki marekup so I can post it here as a blog page. I'm sure this would be of benefit to wiki creators. The experimental beginnings of this page can be found at User:RobertATfm/Sandbox.

The problem is, although the "color=white" attribute of the table style works in the table header row, the "background=#404040" doesn't, so the header ends up as unreadable white on white. It would be acceptable if neither attribute worked, so that the header row would be readable; but to have one work and not the other is unacceptable. And of course the table needs a header row, for without one it wouldn't be sortable.

How do I resolve this problem? — RobertATfm (talk) 20:26, November 12, 2012 (UTC)


 * I assume you know that those attributes are deprecated; and even if they work at all, they have a CSS weight of negative infinity so that any CSS rule will override them just by glancing in the same direction. Depending on the exact format of the HTML, you can probably convert them to  using a regex in your preferred text editor (although you will need something better than notepad, of course). On the other hand, you could just rip off the table on Wikipedia since that's already in Wikimarkup. Lunarity 02:04, November 13, 2012 (UTC)