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htmlhtml-tabletablelayout

Colspan all columns


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?


Solution

  • 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.