Unexpected table rendering issue

[benos]

Found this this weekend when working with some tables for the upcoming Dillon pages.

Say you have a single-celled, one-pixel padded table, brown. Inside that you put another single-celled table, blue; directly above that table and still inside the outer table, you have a transparent, two-pixel gif. On a Windows XP/or 2000 machine, IE renders the nested table with a fat red row above the blue table.

In Mac OS 9, both IE and Netscape render the pages as expected, as does Netscape in Windows 2000/XP.

Can anyone explain why simply putting a transparent gif above a table, both of which are inside another table, blows out the formatting of such a simple code?

A page with examples.

Note: you must be viewing with the offending OS/Browder combo, otherwise both tables will look nearly identical.

thanks,

be

[wide45]

The first table? has the wide brown strip on top. OS 9 Mozilla

[jhgtyre]

I am running XP and IE and don't see the offending fat red row. If it helps any I have IE 6.0.2800.1106.xpsp2.030422-1633 and XP has SP1.

-ld

[John Heiter]

It's an old IE "feature" (aka bug) that reads the space between the last tag inside the cell and the closing TD tag as a break. No idea why it does this but it's always been that way. If you eliminate the spaces between the closing table tag and the closing td tag it will go away. Sometimes HTML is a logical programming language and other time it's just voodoo.

[benos]

Wide,

Now that's weird because I thought Mozilla was the beta tester from which Netscape 7 spawned. Netscape 7 renders it perfectly, but it's there in my Mozilla as well.

Sometimes HTML is a logical programming language and other time it's just voodoo.

Agreed.

It's an old IE "feature" (aka bug) that reads the space between the last tag inside the cell and the closing TD tag as a break. No idea why it does this but it's always been that way. If you eliminate the spaces between the closing table tag and the closing td tag it will go away.

Crazy stuff. And that's what Berkim suggested as well.

It just became one of those obsessive things I just had to know.

Do you have a favorite site that breaks down OS vs Browser compatibility/compliance?

Thanks,

be

[John Heiter]

Not really. Our solution (which isn't practical for most) was to set up a testing lab of about six or eight machines running XP, 2000, NT 4, 98, Linux, Web TV, and Mac OS 9/X. Each one has three or four browsers running on it and if it's important it gets tested in all of those. I used to use old versions of Netscape exclusively because it was such a stickler that if a page ran in Netscape it would almost always run in IE but more recent versions of Netscape are getting more and more forgiving of code errors. You could always go with something like NetMechanic to check your code but I'm not sure that even it will find every issue all the time. They do offer a free sample check that's kind of nice.

John