Funny table column problem, why?

Affects Opera and IE sometimes...

[RobinC]

Hi, doing a website for my boss, and have a strange table effect - the table is 100% width, with 3 columns, and 3 rows, the bottom two rows are colspan=3, but on my bosses computer, in *both* IE and Opera (he's not got moz on there to test) it doesn't layout correctly... Here's the stripped down code -

<table width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
 <tr>
 <td width="191" valign="top" align="left">
  <a href="index.html"><img src="images/widgets.gif" alt="widgets" width="187" height="59" border="0"></a>
 </td>
 <td align="center">
  <font size="4">Widgets</font><br>
  <strong><font size="6">Widgets Info</font></strong>
 </td>
 <td width="191" valign="top" align="right">
  <strong><a href="widgets_at_widgets.info">Email us</a><br>
  Tel: [phone]<br>
  Fax: [phone]</strong>
 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td colspan="3" align="center">
  -page-subtitle-
 </td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td colspan="3" align="center">
  -site-menu-
 </td>
 </tr>
</table>

On my computer everything looks as you'd expect it to look, but on his, the top row isn't laid out properly. The right hand cell, which hould be right/top aligned, isn't, and the center cell (between two identical width other cells) has the text to the right of center - and not by a small amount.

It should look something like -

___________________________________ 
¦ image ¦  Widgets  ¦ link¦ 
¦_______¦___Widget_Info___¦____tel¦ 
¦_________-page-subtitle-_________¦ 
¦___________-site-menu-___________¦ 

but looks more like this -

___________________________________ 
¦image ¦  Widgets ¦link ¦ 
¦_______¦_____Widget_Info_¦tel____¦ 
¦_________-page-subtitle-_________¦ 
¦___________-site-menu-___________¦ 

The thing looks ok on my computer in IE and Mozilla (same version IE), not got mozilla on his, and he's got opera 7 (tried on opera 6 on this machine and it's ok here again)

Thanks in advance (hey, it's an optomistic sort of day ;-)

(edit: fixed a cut'n'paste bug)

[edited by: RobinC at 10:53 am (utc) on Oct. 16, 2003]

[victor]

Validate your HTML -- you'll see you have an unclosed <tr>

Don't know if that'll fix the problem, but it's got to be a start,

[RobinC]

That's a cut'n'paste bug from me snipping out all the company info - the page validates locally (behind a password as it's not live so can't w3c it)

Got my boss's hopes up there - he just ran up and asked if I'd seen the reply ;-)

[victor]

Looks fine on Opera 7.11 here.

Has the full HTML got a DTD for a version of HTML such that some of the table elements are invalid? Perhaps the Boss' Opera version is being extra strict.

Or maybe tell 'em to re-install.

[RobinC]

My boss found the solution (though we don't know *why*) - put the stuff into tables rather than having <br> for multiple lines... Now it's all working ok, at the expense of another couple of bytes filesize... blah ;-)