IE and empty table cells

HTML & CSS
1

Yet again i’m tearing my hair out over IE. I am styling a questionnaire which is laid out in html tables generated by a system and therefore unchangeable. All is well except there are some empty table cells which are generated to allow for extra styling capabilities. I’m not using them so I want them not to show. IE predictably is showing them as 1px high rows and messing up my layout. I have added the following with no effect.

     margin: 0px;
		border: 0px;
		height: 0px;
                padding:0;
                line-height:0;
               overflow:hidden;
               border-style:none; border-spacing:0px;
                width:100px;
                border-collapse: collapse;
                font-size:0;
                float:left;

Anyone got any ideas?

2

Hi, Welcome to Sitepoint :slight_smile:

Do you have a working demo that we can play with as it’s hard to find a specific answer without testing on the actual code? Usually IE won’t show the empty cells but is seems you are giving them width for some reason so I’m not quite sure what you are using them for.

IE7 and under needs the cellspacing attribute as they don’t understand border-spacing but border spacing is irrelevant in the collapsed border model anyway.

3

Thanks for your welcome and your reply. I have been trying to set up a test page for you (it’s a client survey and cannot be shown to public) and the first thing I realised was that there is no doctype. erk. Once I put one in the problem is solved.

Since the code is generated by the system i’m not sure what I can do about it but i’ll give it a go. If you think you can solve a non-doctype td spacing issue then I would love to hear it but it will probably be easier if I try and force one in somehow.

FYI I got a page ready here: Tabletest but it won’t show the images so it may not illustrate the issue very well. the extra spacing is at the top of the page above the blue bar with the section header text in. It will demonstrate the sort of code i’m working with though. It’s challenging…

Thanks again for getting back to me i’m sure i’ll be posting more tricky issues in the future.

4

Yes it would be better to get a doctype on the page because until then all versions of IE will behave much like ie5 and forget anything learned this century.

I couldn’t see an immediate solution to the problem anyway I’m afraid.