lucy24 - 9:34 pm on Jan 2, 2013 (gmt 0)

Funny you should say that, because I played with css and it reminded me of why tables look so good sometimes.

But setting two out of three cells to 50% is probably not optimal, because some browsers will do the arithmetic and simply throw out the numbers.

:: detour to try what I suggested first, but never got around to testing ::

###. Missed the fine print that if your table's width is set to "auto" (either explicitly or by default) then user-agents are allowed to use {table-layout: auto} even if you've expressly said "fixed". Fortunately this is not a problem here, because you can set the table width to 100%.

For me this works:

table.container {width: 100%; table-layout: fixed;}
col.middle {width: 200px;}

<table class = "container">
<col>
<col class = "middle">
<col>
<tr>
<td class = "leftside">

... et cetera. Shove different amounts of text into each cell and it still comes out as intended. Well, not in MSIE 5 but presumably in some version dating from the present millennium it does.

:: looking around vaguely for someone who knows how to do it the right way ::

You could also do it with sandbags, two side-by-side divs and a background image, but that's sort of, er, cheating. (So's using a table, but never mind that :))