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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-04T22:17:16+00:00

IE9 displays table, th and td borders differently from IE8. What is the reason

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IE9 displays table, th and td borders differently from IE8. What is the reason for this and what can be done about it?
As can be seen from below screen prints, the borders seem to have a shaded effect in IE9 which causes them to be not as crisp any more as they were in IE8. This seems to apply to solid (table, th) as well as dotted (td) borders.

html used

<!DOCTYPE html
  PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN">
<html>
   <head>
      <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
      <title>table border test</title>
      <style type="text/css">
table {
    border: solid black 1pt;
    border-collapse: collapse;
    padding: 0;
    border-spacing: 0;
}

th {
    background: rgb(255, 255, 153);
    border-style: solid;
    border-color: black;
    border-width: 1pt;
    padding: 0cm 5pt;
    color: black;
    font-family: Verdana;
    font-size: 10pt;
    font-style: normal;
    vertical-align: top;
}

td {
    border-style: dotted dotted none none;
    border-color: black;
    border-width: 1pt;
    padding: 0cm 5pt;
    color: black;
    font-style: normal;
    font-family: Verdana;
    font-size: 10pt;
    vertical-align: top;
    margin-bottom: 4.5pt;
    margin-top: 0pt;
}

    </style>
      </head>
   <body>
      <br>

      <table>
         <thead>
            <tr>
               <th class="small">col A</th>
               <th class="small">col B</th>
               <th class="large">col C</th>
               <th class="medium">col D</th>
            </tr>
         </thead>
         <tbody>
            <tr>
               <td align="center">A1</td>
               <td align="center">B1</td>
               <td>C1</td>
               <td>D1</td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
               <td align="center">A2</td>
               <td align="center">B2</td>
               <td>C2</td>
               <td>D2</td>
            </tr>
         </tbody>
      </table>
   </body>
</html>

IE8 result

IE8 result

IE9 result

IE9 result

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The pt unit is a physical unit (1/72 of an inch). Newer versions of IE probably use subpixel rendering when given something to render that doesn’t have a whole number of pixels.

    Physical units are poorly served on screen anyway (as browsers often make poor assumptions about the DPI of the screen), so should be reserved for print media.

    Use px instead.

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