Hi everyone... new to the forums, but in no way new to html/css/php/asp/coding/whatever.

This is a rather simple question, but in all my years of experience I've never been able to figure it out.

Lets say I have a table that looks something like this:

<table>
<tr>
<td></td>
<td rowspan="2"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td></td>
</tr>
</table>

In other words, I have one column with two cells and one column with one cell.
Now, as the larger (2 rowspan) right cell fills with content, BOTH left cells scale vertically. Is there ANY way to make only ONE of left cells scale?

Lets say I want the top left cell to remain at a height of 25px, no matter how large the right cell becomes. How can I do this? I've been working around this problem for years, and I'm tired of it!

Thanks for any input.

Sarbae

Lets say I want the top left cell to remain at a height of 25px, no matter how large the right cell becomes. How can I do this?

You can't. That is the nature of tables.

I've been working around this problem for years, and I'm tired of it!

Then maybe you should consider DUMPING the 1997 table layouts and come to the 21st century and use HTML and CSS for layout

Then maybe you should consider DUMPING the 1997 table layouts and come to the 21st century and use HTML and CSS for layout

True!

or you can make a table inside the first table... it works but people are hating that.

I first designed the site using CSS table-less layout but the issue of cross-browser compatability coupled with the nature of my design demanded a switch to classic tabled design. I at first used solely nested tables, since I despise rowspan and colspan attributes, but each browser seems to render borders of nested tables differently. I suppose I'll go back to the tables-within-tables design, and use extra cells instead of borders...

If only we could all agree on a common browser. I can't wait until at least Safari (i.e. the worst browser EVER) is phased out with the upcoming yet overly delayed demise of the Mac OS platform.

Thanks for the replies. I knew it couldn't be done, but I was hoping someone could prove me wrong.

Try using the Appropriate CSS Level for you.

and for the tables rendering issue you make sure you set the cellpadding and cellspacing. You can Mix Tabels and CSS style your TD and Tables with CSS. Its OK

Well some browsers render css-defined cell borders INSIDE the cell while others render the borders OUTSIDE the cell... 1px off makes a world of difference.

true but you can set your borders to SOLID and they will render the same

border-style:solid; border-width:1px; border-color:cyan;

try that

but the issue of cross-browser compatability coupled with the nature of my design demanded a switch to classic tabled design.

meh.. I'm not buying that one. Since I can't see the actual design it's impossible to make any kind of recommendations. Cross-browser isn't all THAT hard, IF you make it work in FF and Opera first, then fix for the very bad IE.

As for the border, this will do:
border: 1px solid cyan; - save yourself the extra lines.

I'm not buying it either LadynRed!

CSS isn't perfect. But its much better in every way.

What we need to remember is that there is a learning curve. At first you will be
making designs that are not as technical as you would like. DON'T REVERT
BACK TO TABLES! If you do, you will never learn how to use css effectively and
efficiently. In time you will get there.

In the good old days, we (basically) only had netscape and ie. But getting
pages to look the same (using tables) in the two took a lot of time and
pepto-bismal... There are many more compatibility issues with table built sites
vs. css sites.

In my 7 years web designing experience, I think, the most important and useful things that I learned are extensible hyper text markup language (xhtml) and cascading syle sheets (css).

Using tables for designing a web site isn't a good way. After learning to code, designing with divisions (div) and cascading style sheets is very simple. And changing the whole site's design is very simple too.

So I recommend everyone learning Xhtml, Css and tableless design with divs and css...