Actually, the question was about a table spanning, in your example, header and footer.
<?
include("header.php");
<!-- This has the <table> tag and the <TD> and my first <TR> tags -->
?>
<h1> this is my page 1</h1>
fill the page with whatever you want.
<?
include("footer.php");
<!-- this is where I put my second <tr> </tr> pair and the </table> tag -->
?>
As I look at how PHP works, it's apparent that would be no problem doing that. What (I think) PHP is doing is building the HTML from other files without interpreting them - the browser will be doing that. <smacking head!!>
DJMaze - thanks for that example. I have to actually play with it a bit to get comfortable with the language, but it's really not that hard! I actually wrote a word processor back in 1979 that was very much like HTML with some PHP capabilities (conditional processing and 'include' processing - it let me build a meta-document made up of many different files - and, I did it in BASIC, to boot!!).
Thanks for the assistance all!!
Frank