I'm talking about the still respected kind of table: the one with tabular data.

I have three of such tables on a website I'm building.

One stays in the center, the others slide to the left, even though I wrote in the CSS:

#main {
text-align: center;
}

HTML and CSS passes validation without error, I even filled empty table cells with " ".

The one table that respects the align: center; is the one with no empty table cells. the other two have one empty <th> each. Putting in "&nbsp;" doesn't help.

Do I have to give the tables a class, and then put the text-align: center; right into the CSS of this class?

Is there something about tables that stays in the shadow from my searching eyes?

The text-align: center will only center the data inside the table. If you give the table a width, you can use the margin: 0 auto; method to center it.

Thanks, lady!

I'll give all tables a class and handle it so with the CSS.

The way I do it is to use css and do:
table#id{
margin-left:auto;
margin-right:auto;
}

You still have to define a width to make that work.