If you absolutely position the span.close, it won't take up space and your title should be perfectly centered:
tr td {
position: relative;
}
tr td span.close {
position: absolute;
top: 0;
right: 0;
}
Edit Whoops - never encountered that before. Normally a parent with position: relative will act as the coordinate system for a child with position: absolute, but not in the case of a <td>. If you wrap your title and span.close in a <div> with the following code you should be in business:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4 strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<style>
table {border: 1px solid black; width: 500px}
.title div {
position: relative;
height: 40px;
}
td {text-align: center; border: 1px solid black}
td span.close {
position: absolute;
top: 0;
right: 0;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<table>
<tr>
<td class="title">
<div>Centered <span class="close">XXXXX</span></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>content</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>content</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>content</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
Pat
2009-08-12 15:14:33