What is the purpose of setting width equal to an asterisk in inline styles?

Question

So, maybe this is a typo but I came across some old code:

Was this a typo? or does this do something

Answer 1

That's not "inline style", but legacy HTML that should be avoided in favor of CSS. But, to answer your question, it means, essentially, "fill". But, in practice it has no effect and can be safely removed.

http://jsfiddle.net/sn4qn/5/

Perhaps it's there as an indicator to future developers that the width was intended to be set automatically by the browser.