I’ve just encountered a weird bug/feature in table cells under Chrome & Firefox.
it seems a TD tag with valign=middle is overwritten by the vertical-align css property.
Check this jsfiddle example out: http://jsfiddle.net/8CDFq/1/
the first cell has valign=middle in the HTML part. All cells have the vertical-align:bottom property.
In Chrome’s debug bar it shows the following:

look at the regions in red. it’s lying! 😀
My assumption was that valign vas considered as an inline style == wrong ?
Yes. CSS trumps obsolete HTML attributes as per section 6.4.4 of the specification