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Understanding td width in Firefox 3.5 and Internet Explorer 8

Answer 1

+1 A:

IE 7 and above understand min-width / min-height on TD's only (IE 8 on most block-level elements), It can be frustrating as IE calculates auto widths of table cells differently. Your best bet in this situation is to be able to set some sort of width to the cells, even if it is a reference and give preference to particular cells with nowrap if you wish to prevent that.

Dustin Hansen 2009-12-02 23:49:51

I think this answer is the right one for my particular situation, thanks. However, I'm going to hold out for a more comprehensive article or blog post about the problem of getting tables to work well across browsers.

dfrankow 2009-12-02 23:57:12

Answer 2

+1 A:

This is what I tried on FF3.5 and IE8:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"&gt;
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<table style="width: 600px;" border="1">
  <tr>
    <td style="width:auto">td1</td>
    <td style="width:150px">td2</td>
    <td style="width:200px">td3</td>
  </tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>

Both looks the same, what's your code the is significantly different from the above?

EDIT:
I tried it with doctype transitional too, same result.

o.k.w 2009-12-03 00:49:43

I appreciate your attempts. I didn't post the example because I didn't want to update my live site with HTML that looked bad. The table itself was quite complicated, with column 2 being a jquery ratings widget with half-stars, and every other row was colspan=3, etc. etc.

dfrankow 2009-12-03 16:53:07

We ended up solving our problem by adding style="width:100%;" to the rows with colspan="3". Without that, IE 8 would strangely squash column 1.

dfrankow 2009-12-03 16:55:24

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Understanding td width in Firefox 3.5 and Internet Explorer 8

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