Question

I am facing the issue with html Table element cell width. Width of the table cell is not same in IE8 and IE9. Please find the below code snippet where I set the width for table cell using table colgroup and width for table as 100%.

[Html]

 <table  id="Grid1_Table" class="Table">
   <colgroup>
    <col style="width:20px">
    <col style="width:20px">
    <col style="width:180px">
    <col style="width:200px">
  </colgroup>
 <tbody>
   <tr>
    <td class="RowHeader"><div>&nbsp;</div></td>
    <td class="RecordPlusCollapse" ><div>&nbsp;</div></td>
    <td colspan="2" class="GroupCaption">Order ID: 0 - 1 Items</td>
  </tr>
 </tbody>

[CSS]

.RowHeader
 { 
    background-color : black;
 }

 .GroupCaption
 {    
    background-color : #868981;
 }
 .RecordPlusCollapse
 {  
    background-color : red;
 }
 .Table
 {
    width:100%;
 }

Please refer the below fiddler file to check the issue with IE8 and IE9.

http://jsfiddle.net/KgfsM/21/

Could you please check on this?

Answer 1

First of all, the markup violates the HTML table model; if you try to validate the code snippet using HTML5 doctype (and the missing </table> added), the validator will report the error “Table column 4 established by element col has no cells beginning in it.”

Second, you are setting column widths in pixels and the total table width as 100%. This constitutes a request that cannot be fulfilled except in a very special case where the available width happens to coincide with the sum of the pixel widths plus borders, border spacing, and cell spacing. It’s no wonder that browsers react differently to this.

Thus, you need to specify the widths consistently. Either remove the setting of 100% width, or remove at least one of the column width settings. You might still have a problem (browsers may react differently even to this), and table-layout: fixed might not help (or might introduce new problems), but then there would a new, relatively well-defined problem.