colspan width issue

Question

I\'m having trouble setting fixed widths on columns which use colspan.

It seems that neither IE8, Firefox or Chrome can figure out how to correctly size

Answer 1

It has to do with the way browsers calculate the widths for each column. Tables require more overhead because of their flexible nature and more than 1 pass depending on what dimensions you set and content.

To make a long story short, colspan on the first row when you want to set column widths on subsequent rows gums up the works. There are plenty of good ways to fix it, a bad way, however easy would be to have the very first row with 1 pixel of height setting the trend for the column widths.