Default value of vertical-align for table cells

Question

According to the spec, the default value of vertical-align is baseline.

baseline

Align the baseline of the box w

Answer 1

As said by the spec, the initial value of vertical-align is always baseline:

vertical-align

• Initial: baseline

However, as explained in The cascade,

Conforming user agents must apply a default style sheet (or behave as if they did).

A user agent's default style sheet should present the elements of the document language in ways that satisfy general presentation expectations for the document language.

See A sample style sheet for HTML for a recommended default style sheet for HTML documents.

And that recommended stylesheet contains

thead, tbody,
tfoot           { vertical-align: middle }
td, th, tr      { vertical-align: inherit }

Therefore, if you (author origin) don't provide any value for tbody's nor td's vertical-align, the cascade will retrieve the middle value from the user agent origin.

Note the default style sheet is implementation dependent, so some browsers may set different vertical-align values for different elements.