I want to create a table which look like this:
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
|January 12th, 2012
IE always treats width on table cells as min-width, at least up to version 8 (don't know about 9).
The only way I have found around this is to either specify explicit widths on all the table cells, or to use Javascript to set the width after loading (but before displaying).
I would suggest giving those cells a class and then style with
<style>
.td_class {width: 20px;}
</style>
I had forgotten that the table has the style 'table-layout: fixed' and this was causing the difficulty. When this style is set the widths of the cells in the first row are applied to all following rows. As the first row contained a colspan I guess IE got confused (FF handles it ok).
Any way it's not as flexible as I wanted but this worked for me.
<html>
<body>
<div style="width:350px; border:blue 1px solid">
<table border="0" style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica;font-size:10pt;table-layout:fixed;">
<tr>
<td style="width:17px;"/>
<td style="width:20px;"/>
<td style="width:180px;"/>
<td style="width:130px;"/>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="4" style="width:100%;text-align:center;font-eight:bold;background-color:#eef;">09 January 2012</td>
</tr>
<tr title="09 January 2012">
<td align="center" valign="middle" colspan="1" style="width:17px;height:1.1em;"><img src="../../../../_layouts/images/WebParts2010/AWT3_Klein.png" style="border-style:None;border-width:0px;height:1.1em;width:1.1em;" /></td>
<td align="left" valign="top" colspan="1" style="width:20px;height:1.1em;text-overflow:ellipsis;overflow:hidden;white-space:nowrap;">LO</td>
<td align="left" valign="top" colspan="1" style="width:180px;height:1.1em;text-overflow:ellipsis;overflow:hidden;white-space:nowrap;">Customer Name Ltd.</td>
<td align="left" valign="top" colspan="1" style="width:120px;height:1.1em;text-overflow:ellipsis;overflow:hidden;white-space:nowrap;">Reason for visiting today</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
</body>
</html>
As found in this answer you can set attributes for the entire table via colgroup
and col
. That way you are able to set individual attributes even for the (invisible single) cells inside the colspan in the first row.
In your example it would be:
<table>
<colgroup>
<col width="20" />
<col />
<col />
</colgroup>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td colspan="3">January 12th 2011 this here is just for padding to make table wider</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> x </td>
<td>First item</td>
<td>Second item</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
Here's a fiddle