dorayme said:
Some mention was made, iirc, about having the cells the same size. You
can achieve this, but there are no guarantees across all browsers,
depending on how you width the table family elements and the nature of
your content. To take two simple cases, if you don't width your table
element, leaving it at its default auto and give sufficient width to
the TD elements for content to wrap,
....
er... that was sent in mid composition by accident!
The other simple case was where you give a percentage width to the
cells, as many as needed, to make up the whole, in this case, you
don't need to set a width to the table element.
But really, there are too many variables in these matters to summarise
a set of simple rules that most people will easily remember. The
presence of borders, paddings, margins, unexpected user text sizes,
can throw off a lot of these calculations and expectations.
The truth is that it is very much better not to be bothered about, not
to want, such precision, to let tables find their own ways, to dictate
as little as possible about widths and heights. The browser not only
is often likely to do a more reasonable user friendly layout all on
its own but can ignore your widths and heights with no particular
censure from HTML specifications.
It goes against the whole idea of flexibility and fluidity and
adaptability to try to force equal width cells across. It is often
simply a waste of space (because small content does not need to be as
wide as bigger content) in pursuit of an overly simplistic aesthetic.