How can I specify a td tag should span all columns (when the exact amount of columns in the table will be variable/difficult to determine when the HTML is being rendered)? w3schools mentions you can use colspan="0", but it doesn't say exactly what browsers support that value (IE 6 is in our list to support).
It appears that setting colspan to a value greater than the theoretical amount of columns you may have will work, but it will not work if you have table-layout set to fixed. Are there any disadvantages to using an automatic layout with a large number for colspan? Is there a more correct way of doing this?
Just use this:
colspan="100%"
It works on Firefox 3.6, IE 7 and Opera 11! (and I guess on others, I couldn't try)
Warning: as mentioned in the comments below this is actually the same as colspan="100". Hence, this solution will break for tables with css table-layout: fixed, or more than 100 columns.
I have IE 7.0, Firefox 3.0 and Chrome 1.0
The colspan="0" attribute in a TD is NOT spanning across all TDs in any of the above browsers.
Maybe not recommended as proper markup practice, but if you give a higher colspan value than the total possible no. of columns in other rows, then the TD would span all the columns.
This does NOT work when the table-layout CSS property is set to fixed.
Once again, this is not the perfect solution but seems to work in the above mentioned 3 browser versions when the table-layout CSS property is automatic.
If you want to make a 'title' cell that spans all columns, as header for your table, you may want to use the caption tag (http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_caption.asp / https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/caption) This element is meant for this purpose. It behaves like a div, but doesn't span the entire width of the parent of the table (like a div would do in the same position (don't try this at home!)), instead, it spans the width of the table. There are some cross-browser issues with borders and such (was acceptable for me). Anyways, you can make it look as a cell that spans all columns. Within, you can make rows by adding div-elements. I'm not sure if you can insert it in between tr-elements, but that would be a hack I guess (so not recommended). Another option would be messing around with floating divs, but that is yuck!
Do
<table>
<caption style="gimme some style!"><!-- Title of table --></caption>
<thead><!-- ... --></thead>
<tbody><!-- ... --></tbody>
</table>
Don't
<div>
<div style="float: left;/* extra styling /*"><!-- Title of table --></div>
<table>
<thead><!-- ... --></thead>
<tbody><!-- ... --></tbody>
</table>
<div style="clear: both"></div>
</div>
As a partial answer, here's a few points about colspan="0", which was mentioned in the question.
tl;dr version:
colspan="0" doesn't work in any browser whatsoever. W3Schools is wrong (as usual). HTML 4 said that colspan="0" should cause a column to span the whole table, but nobody implemented this and it was removed from the spec after HTML 4.
Some more detail and evidence:
All major browsers treat it as equivalent to colspan="1".
Here's a demo showing this; try it on any browser you like.
td {
border: 1px solid black;
}
<table>
<tr>
<td>ay</td>
<td>bee</td>
<td>see</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="0">colspan="0"</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="1">colspan="1"</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="3">colspan="3"</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="1000">colspan="1000"</td>
</tr>
</table>
The HTML 4 spec (now old and outdated, but current back when this question was asked) did indeed say that colspan="0" should be treated as spanning all columns:
The value zero ("0") means that the cell spans all columns from the current column to the last column of the column group (COLGROUP) in which the cell is defined.
However, most browsers never implemented this.
HTML 5.0 (made a candidate recommendation back in 2012), the WhatWG HTML living standard (the dominant standard today), and the latest W3 HTML 5 spec all do not contain the wording quoted from HTML 4 above, and unanimously agree that a colspan of 0 is not allowed, with this wording which appears in all three specs:
The td and th elements may have a colspan content attribute specified, whose value must be a valid non-negative integer greater than zero ...
Sources:
https://www.w3.org/TR/html50/tabular-data.html#attributes-common-to-td-and-th-elements
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/tables.html#attributes-common-to-td-and-th-elements
https://www.w3.org/TR/html53/tabular-data.html#attributes-common-to-td-and-th-elements
The following claims from the W3Schools page linked to in the question are - at least nowadays - completely false:
Only Firefox supports colspan="0", which has a special meaning ... [It] tells the browser to span the cell to the last column of the column group (colgroup)
and
Differences Between HTML 4.01 and HTML5
NONE.
If you're not already aware that W3Schools is generally held in contempt by web developers for its frequent inaccuracies, consider this a lesson in why.
For IE 6, you'll want to equal colspan to the number of columns in your table. If you have 5 columns, then you'll want: colspan="5".
The reason is that IE handles colspans differently, it uses the HTML 3.2 specification:
IE implements the HTML 3.2 definition, it sets colspan=0 as colspan=1.
The bug is well documented.
If you're using jQuery (or don't mind adding it), this will get the job done better than any of these hacks.
function getMaxColCount($table) {
var maxCol = 0;
$table.find('tr').each(function(i,o) {
var colCount = 0;
$(o).find('td:not(.maxcols),th:not(.maxcols)').each(function(i,oo) {
var cc = Number($(oo).attr('colspan'));
if (cc) {
colCount += cc;
} else {
colCount += 1;
}
});
if(colCount > maxCol) {
maxCol = colCount;
}
});
return maxCol;
}
To ease the implementation, I decorate any td/th I need adjusted with a class such as "maxCol" then I can do the following:
$('td.maxcols, th.maxcols').each(function(i,o) {
$t = $($(o).parents('table')[0]); $(o).attr('colspan', getMaxColCount($t));
});
If you find an implementation this won't work for, don't slam the answer, explain in comments and I'll update if it can be covered.
Another working but ugly solution : colspan="100", where 100 is a value larger than total columns you need to colspan.
According to the W3C, the colspan="0" option is valid only with COLGROUP tag.
Below is a concise es6 solution (similar to Rainbabba's answer but without the jQuery).
Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('[data-colspan-max]')).forEach(td => {
let table = td;
while (table && table.nodeName !== 'TABLE') table = table.parentNode;
td.colSpan = Array.from(table.querySelector('tr').children).reduce((acc, child) => acc + child.colSpan, 0);
});
html {
font-family: Verdana;
}
tr > * {
padding: 1rem;
box-shadow: 0 0 8px gray inset;
}
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Header 1</th>
<th>Header 2</th>
<th>Header 3</th>
<th>Header 4</th>
<th>Header 5</th>
<th>Header 6</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbod><tr>
<td data-colspan-max>td will be set to full width</td>
</tr></tbod>
</table>
Simply set colspan to the number of columns in the table.
All other "shortcuts" have pitfalls.
The best thing to do is set the colspan to the correct number to begin with. If your table has 5 columns, set it to colspan="5" That is the only way that will work in all scenarios. No, it's not an outdated solution or only recommended for IE6 or anything -- that's literally the best way to handle this.
I wouldn't recommend using Javascript to solve this unless the number of columns changes during runtime.
If the number of columns is variable, then you'll need to calculate the number of columns so that you can populate the colspan. If you have a variable number of columns, whatever is generating the table should be able to be adapted to also calculate the number of columns the table has.
As other answers have mentioned, if your table is not set to table-layout: fixed, you can also just set colspan to a really large number. But I find this solution messy, and it can be a headache if you come back later and decide it should be a fixed table layout. Better just to do it correctly the first time.
A CSS solution would be ideal, but I was unable to find one, so here is a JavaScript solution: for a tr element with a given class, maximize it by selecting a full row, counting its td elements and their colSpan attributes, and just setting the widened row with el.colSpan = newcolspan;. Like so...
var headertablerows = document.getElementsByClassName('max-col-span');
[].forEach.call(headertablerows, function (headertablerow) {
var colspan = 0;
[].forEach.call(headertablerow.nextElementSibling.children, function (child) {
colspan += child.colSpan ? parseInt(child.colSpan, 10) : 1;
});
headertablerow.children[0].colSpan = colspan;
});
html {
font-family: Verdana;
}
tr > * {
padding: 1rem;
box-shadow: 0 0 8px gray inset;
}
<table>
<tr class="max-col-span">
<td>1 - max width
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>2 - no colspan
</td>
<td colspan="2">3 - colspan is 2
</td>
</tr>
</table>
You may need to adjust this if you're using table headers, but this should give a proof-of-concept approach that uses 100% pure JavaScript.
Anyone else here feel that diving into JS for this seemingly minor issue seems a bit much?
PURE CSS
Boom! I have a pure CSS solution to offer you! Example is below, you just have to add a class to the row that you want to span all columns. Then the CSS will make the first <td> element span the full width and hide the remaining <td> elements. (You must use visibility:hidden; and NOT display:none; for this.)
Note: You will need at least two cells for this method to render nicely, and CSS will render best if you keep the correct quantity of <td> elements - don't remove any to make room for span element. This will help ensure the cells / rows still flow normally.
EXAMPLE
/* standard styling css */
table {
border-collapse: collapse;
}
table, tr, td {
border: 1px solid black;
}
td {
padding: 3px;
}
/* make full width class span the whole table */
.full-span {
position:relative;
}
.full-span > * {
visibility: hidden;
border:0;
}
.full-span > *:nth-child(1) {
display: block;
visibility: unset;
position:absolute;
}
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>A1</td>
<td>A2</td>
<td>A3</td>
<td>A4</td>
</tr>
<tr class="full-span">
<td>B1 long text</td>
<td>B2</td>
<td>B3</td>
<td>B4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>C1</td>
<td>C2</td>
<td>C3</td>
<td>C4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>D1</td>
<td>D2</td>
<td>D3</td>
<td>D4</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
Bonus tip!
if you are dynamically producing your table in PHP/JS, this may clean up some of your code. Say you are looping through a 2D array to create a table: for each row that needs to span all columns you'll need to add some logic to calculate the amount of columns, add the colspan attribute, add any remaining <td> elements required to make up the full width of the table and so on.
Using my method, you can loop through all the columns and output them all, and simply include the class in the parent row.
Just want to add my experience and answer to this.
Note: It only works when you have a pre-defined table and a tr with ths, but are loading in your rows (for example via AJAX) dynamically.
In this case you can count the number of th's there are in your first header row, and use that to span the whole column.
This can be needed when you want to relay a message when no results have been found.
Something like this in jQuery, where table is your input table:
var trs = $(table).find("tr");
var numberColumns = 999;
if (trs.length === 1) {
//Assume having one row means that there is a header
var headerColumns = $(trs).find("th").length;
if (headerColumns > 0) {
numberColumns = headerColumns;
}
}
colspan="100%"
it's work also in email outlook , gmail....
Related
Somehow I can't figure out the following: Alternate table row color using CSS?
If I use the code suggested in the aforementioned topic the even cells get colored (the first, third and fifth. There is a total of 5 cells in a row). It doesn't matter if I use 'even' or 'odd'.
td:nth-child(odd)
{
background: #f5f6fa;
}
If use the following code, all the rows get colored.:
tr:nth-child(odd)
{
background: #f5f6fa;
}
#svdh You've got tags outside of your body and html tags also which in a normal web page wouldn't be rendered. The problem with your HTML is you're setting up loads of tables instead of one with multiple rows. It should be like this.
<table>
<tr>
<td>One</td>
<td>One.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Two</td>
<td>Two.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Three</td>
<td>Three.</td>
</tr>
</table>
Fiddle here..
https://jsfiddle.net/fo7Ldfqs/
UPDATED:
If you've got multiple tables and you're trying to color every other one then just use:
table:nth-child(odd){background:#ff0000;}
Fiddle here.. https://jsfiddle.net/4641ph6u/
I have a simple table
<tr>
<td class="first">I am the first</td>
<td class="second">You are the second</td>
<td class="third">He is third</td>
<td class="fourth">Someone else is fourth</td>
<td class="fifth">That guy is fifht</td>
<td class="sixth">Who care's about sixth</td>
</tr>
I want to apply css rules on some of classes in td only. I can write something like-
td.first, td.fourth, td.fifth
{
color:purple;
}
This works. Or i can use classes. I was wondering is there any efficient/ better way to write selectors in such case.
My concern:
Is browser, is going to look for all class and then search for td for each comma separation. That means it going to find all three classes and then evaluate tag. Is there any way that browser will find all three classes and then matches the tag other than using a single class.
Addressing Your Concern
You state:
My concern: Is browser, is going to look for all td for each comma
separation and find the class match. That means it going to find all
td tags three times. If this is true, how can i make browser to search
for td tags once and then find class matches.
But that is not how css evaluates, as it goes from right to left. In the case you give:
td.first, td.fourth, td.fifth
{
color:purple;
}
So it will not search "three times" through td elements. Rather, it will match the .first class in your document (where ever it is), then check to see if it is applied to td element, and if so, match. Then evaluate .fourth, etc. in a similar fashion.
So if your concern is iterations through td elements, then your concern is invalid. Your code is efficient as it is.
For specific properties, you can create separate classes.
For example, in your case, you can make a class .color and write like this:
<tr>
<td class="first color">I am the first</td>
<td class="second">You are the second</td>
<td class="third">He is third</td>
<td class="fourth color">Someone else is fourth</td>
<td class="fifth color">That guy is fifht</td>
<td class="sixth">Who care's about sixth</td>
</tr>
.color{color:purple;}
You can use the :nth-child property to achieve the same without giving all these different classes to your TDs
i.e:
td:nth-child(1),
td:nth-child(4),
td:nth-child(5) {
color:purple;
}
I have a HTML table, and i would like to give the last row (in <tfoot> tag) only one cell expanding to all the table.
I was using colspan="0", then i saw that it only worked in Firefox.
I then tried colspan="100%".
It works fine, but not pass the w3c validator (Very important in my project).
Is there a working alternative ?
I saw people who use colspan="1000", not a bad idea but are there some performance problems with this ?
Thanks for advice.
My first answer is: refactor your code. If you need the total number of columns to build the table footer then the function you use to build the table body should return that number (and not only the HTML).
That said and only in case it's too complicated (or you don't have control about that code) you may simply count them by yourself, I would avoid any trick about colspan because it's behavior isn't homogeneous (and it's not validated too).
You can easy count the number of cells using the first row (if the table is well formed all the rows have the same number of columns).
The first naive solution would be to split() HTML tbody then to substr_count() the <td/> of the first row. Unfortunately this may work only in a very controlled situation (tables must be well formed, table may contain or not tbody and it doesn't manage colspan of that cells).
Better solution involves a small HTML parser (see this great post here on SO for a good and detailed list), when you have DOM then you can easily count TDs and check for their attributes (I say this in advance: no, you can't use regex to parse HTML).
To be honest I think refactoring is much more suitable...
Might be the following code I use could be useful too:
var len = document.getElementById("myTable").rows[0].cells.length;
document.getElementById("myTablelastrowfirstcell").colSpan = len;
the first line gets into the variable len the number of cells (td or th elements, doesn't matter, if all the table has the same number of column) contained into the first row of mytable;
The second row modifies the colspan property/attribute of the targeted cell positioned into the last row and sets it to the value previously got.
The following has the same code, shortened:
document.getElementById("myTablelastrowfirstcell").colSpan = document.getElementById("myTable").rows[0].cells.length;
Notes:
Sometimes the table contains a thead, a tbody and a tfoot. In such
case it is needed to modify the code using the id of one of them
that has the correct number of columns to return.
The given examples, in some situations, might work only when rendered by the browser, if rendered for printing they might won't work anymore and table layout might be different.
Working example (click on run code example at the end of the code to run it and see how it operates):
function spanLastRowCols() {
var len = document.getElementById("myTable").rows[0].cells.length;
var len = document.getElementById("ext").colSpan = len;
info.innerText = len;
}
table, td {
border: 1px solid black;
}
<p>Click the button to change the content of the first table cell.</p>
<p>Then copy and paste some td cells for each rows forthe first and the second tr. Than run the snippet again and click the button to change the content of the first table cell to compare differences.</p>
<table id="myTable">
<tr>
<td>Row1 cell1</td>
<td>Row1 cell2</td>
<td>Row1 cell3</td>
<td>Row1 cell4</td>
<td>Row1 cell5</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Row2 cell1</td>
<td>Row2 cell2</td>
<td>Row2 cell3</td>
<td>Row2 cell4</td>
<td>Row2 cell5</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td id= "ext">Row3 cell1</td>
</tr>
</table>
<br>
<button onclick="spanLastRowCols()">Try it</button>
Last row colSpan attribute value: <span id="info"></span>
The <caption> tag is well supported and will give you a result similar to <tfoot colspan="1000">:
table {
background: #eee;
}
table caption {
background: #e0e0e0;
}
td,
th {
margin: 5px;
padding: 5px;
}
<table>
<thead>
<th>Quote</th>
<th>Author</th>
<th>More</th>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>One cow at a time, set free the entire herd</td>
<td colspan="2">Prosper Stupefy</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
<caption style="caption-side:bottom">This will always span to the full width of the table</caption>
<caption style="caption-side:top">A list of made-up quotes</caption>
</table>
Note that you will need to css style it.
Documentation: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/caption
I have created a table in ASPX. I want to hide one of the columns based on the requirement but there is no attribute like visible in the HTML table building. How can I solve my problem?
You need to use Style Sheet for this purpose.
<td style="display:none;">
You can use the nth-child CSS selector to hide a whole column:
#myTable tr > *:nth-child(2) {
display: none;
}
This works under assumption that a cell of column N (be it a th or td) is always the Nth child element of its row.
Here's a demo.
If you want the column number to be dynamic, you could do that using querySelectorAll or any framework presenting similar functionality, like jQuery here:
$('#myTable tr > *:nth-child(2)').hide();
Demo with jQuery
(The jQuery solution also works on legacy browsers that don't support nth-child).
you can also use:
<td style="visibility:hidden;">
or
<td style="visibility:collapse;">
The difference between them that "hidden" hides the cell but it holds the space but with "collapse" the space is not held like display:none. This is significant when hidding a whole column or row.
Kos's answer is almost right, but can have damaging side effects. This is more correct:
#myTable tr td:nth-child(1), #myTable th:nth-child(1) {
display: none;
}
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) will cascade attributes to all of its children. This means that *:nth-child(1) will hide the first td of each tr AND hide the first element of all td children. If any of your td have things like buttons, icons, inputs, or selects, the first one will be hidden (woops!).
Even if you don't currently have things that will be hidden, image your frustration down the road if you need to add one. Don't punish your future self like that, that's going to be a pain to debug!
My answer will only hide the first td and th on all tr in #myTable keeping your other elements safe.
Bootstrap people use .hidden class on <td>.
You can also hide a column using the col element https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/HTML/Element/col
To hide the second column in a table:
<table>
<col />
<col style="visibility:collapse"/>
<tr><td>visible</td><td>hidden</td></tr>
<tr><td>visible</td><td>hidden</td></tr>
Known issues: this won't work in Google Chrome. Please vote for the bug at https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=174167
<style>
.hideFullColumn tr > .hidecol
{
display:none;
}
</style>
use .hideFullColumn in table and .hidecol in th.You don't need to add class in td individually as it will be problem because index may not be in mind of each td.
You can also do what vs dev suggests programmatically by assigning the style with Javascript by iterating through the columns and setting the td element at a specific index to have that style.
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<style id="myStyleSheet">
...
</style>
var column = 3;
var styleSheet = document.getElementById("myStyleSheet").sheet;
var rule = "table tr td:nth-child("+ column +"),table th:nth-child("+ column +")
{display: none}";
styleSheet.insertRule(rule);
Here is the another solution to hide dynamically a column
define class for both th and td of the column to hide
<table>
<tr>
<th> Column 1 </th>
<th class="dynamic-hidden-col"> Column 2 </th>
<th Column 3 </th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> Value 1 </td>
<td class="dynamic-hidden-col"> Value 2 </td>
<td> Value 3 </td>
</tr>
<td> row 2 Value 1 </td>
<td class="dynamic-hidden-col"> row 2 Value 2 </td>
<td> row 2 Value 3 </td>
<tr>
</table>
Here is the Jquery script for hide column.
$('#hide-col').click(function () {
$(".dynmic-hidden-col").hide();
});
This way the table column can be hidden dynamically.
I have a table as follow:
<table>
<tr>
<td>
*PROBLEMATIC CELL*
</td>
<td rowspan="2">
</td>
<td rowspan="3">
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="2">
</td>
</tr>
</table>
The first cell of the first row, has a padding at the bottom. Well it's not really padding but it looks like padding and using firebug I can not find what the space there actually is.
I think what is happening is that, firefox automatically adjusts the bottom padding of the first td in the first tr with the padding top of the first and only td of the second tr.
p.s. works perfectly fine in Chrome.
Basically what I am trying to achieve is for the height of the first td in the first tr, to be only as tall as required but not taller so that the content of that cell ends on the same place as where the td ends without any space between them.
The website URL is: http://mmamail.com/
It seems to have something to do with the padding-top placed on the first TD of the SECOND TR. The weird thing is that it works nicely on chrome.
You've presented the browser with an incomplete layout problem. You have a three-by-three grid, none of whose columns or rows have fixed sizes. So the issue is you end up with a taller first row than you intended, as the browser tries to allocate ‘spare’ height caused by the rowspan in the second column amongst the cells in the first column.
There isn't a standardised algorithm for this; browsers do different things, often including unpleasant things like looking at the raw number of bytes of markup in each cell. You don't want to rely on this behaviour. It also slows page rendering down and can give really weird, page-distorting effects when there's a very small or large amount of content. If you need to use tables for layout, make sure to use table-layout: fixed with explicit widths for the fixed-size columns, and set explicit heights for cells when there are rowspans, to avoid ambiguity.
But a proliferation of rowspan/colspan is often a hint you should be looking at a different form of layout. This example is very much easier to acheive using CSS instead. eg.:
<div id="ads">
<script type="text/javascript">//...google stuff...</script>
...
</div>
<div id="content">
<div id="video"><fieldset>
<legend>...</legend>
<object ...>
</fieldset></div>
<form id="poll" method="post" action="..."><fieldset>
<legend>...</legend>
...options...
</fieldset></form>
<form id="subscribe" method="post" action="..."><fieldset>
<legend>...</legend>
...fields...
</fieldset></form>
<div id="about">
...
</div>
</div>
with styles something like:
#ads { position: absolute; right: 0; width: 160px; }
#content { margin-right: 160px; }
#video { float: right; width: 440px; }
#poll, #subscribe { margin: 0 440px 0 0; }
#about { clear: right; }
I'd also advise you to move the JavaScript logic out from the inline event handler attributes you currently have to separate JavaScript blocks (either embedded <script> blocks or linked external scripts). Especially for the multi-line event handlers: quite apart from the horrible maintainability of mixing scripts into markup, in HTML/XML newlines in attributes are not preserved. That means your newlines in JS code are converted into spaces, so if you miss a single semicolon your script will break or behave oddly (where usually in a script block or external script, the auto-newline-semicolon-fallback would save you).
ie.
onsubmit="
var inputs = this.getElementsByTagName('input');
var checkedValue;
for(var i = 0; i < inputs.length; i++)
{
if(inputs[i].getAttribute('type') == 'radio' && inputs[i].checked)
{
checkedValue = inputs[i].value;
}
}
/*makeAjaxPostRequest('/poll/ajax-vote.php', 'vote='+checkedValue, processAjaxResponse);*/
makeAjaxGetRequest('/poll/ajax-vote.php?vote='+checkedValue, processAjaxResponse);
return false;"
instead:
<form id="pollForm" method="post" action="/poll/form-vote.php>
...
</form>
<script type="text/javascript">
document.getElementById('pollForm').onsubmit= function() {
var checkedValue= getRadioValue(this.elements.vote);
makeAjaxPostRequest('/poll/ajax-vote.php', 'vote='+encodeURIComponent(checkedValue), processAjaxResponse);
return false;
};
function getRadioValue(fields) {
for (var i= fields.length; i-->0;)
if (fields[i].checked)
return fields.value;
return '';
};
</script>
Always allow only POST requests for active forms that do something positive. Always use encodeURIComponent when creating query strings. Don't use getAttribute as it doesn't work right in IE; use direct DOM Level 1 HTML properties instead, eg. input.type.
if you are referring to the space in between the "Monthly poll" and "Monthly Magazine" boxes, it is not caused by padding...
What's happening is the td containing the flash video is too tall, and because it has a rowspan of 2, the two tds on the left are being adjusted to the height of the tallest td (aka the video box)
One solution is to add another tr below the first 2 rows,
let it have an empty td,
change the rowspan of the video box to 3
And then the redundant space you see in between the first 2 boxes will be transfered to the empty td you have just created.
OR
I would suggest you bite the bullet and start using CSS rather than tables for layout, purely because:
We are in the second decade of the 21st century
It is much more flexible to use CSS
It will be much easier for you change the look of the site in th future, without touching the markup.
It will be much better for search engines to index your site content
Assistive software such as screen readers can see your content in the order they are supposed to be seen
You will be one happy developer in the end
Controlling table cell padding with css can be tricky. Try adding these two css rules:
table { border-spacing: 0; }
table td { padding: 0; }
Unfortunately, the border-spacing rule isn't supported by all browser, so you may have to add cellpadding="0" and cellspacing="0" as an attribute to the table.
I've tried with the follow HTML code which is merely a more complete version of your code fragment. However, I'm seeing no padding as you have described. So my best guess is that it's caused by some other CSS rules you defined elsewhere.
<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<table>
<tr>
<td>
*PROBLEMATIC CELL*
</td>
<td rowspan="2">
</td>
<td rowspan="3">
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="2">
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>