Physically printing as in if the page is printed? If so, I don't think you can control that - I think it's up to the user to choose to print background colors in their browser's print options.
You said "printing" originally - do you really mean printing or do you mean displaying on-screen? To answer your last question, the answer is "it depends". Something like this? <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us" /> <title>Test</title> </head> <body> <table style="border-collapse: collapse;"> <tr style="border: 3px solid red;"> <td>cell 1</td> <td>cell 2</td> </tr> <tr> <td>cell 3</td> <td>cell 5</td> </tr> </table> </body> </html> Code (markup):