What causes the width of unrelated cells to change when the contents of colspan'd cells expand in IE7?

Before we delve into the details, I invite you to take a look at this fiddle using IE7. It's quite intricate and not something I want to repeat here.

The main issue is that clicking on the red block should display additional information. The top row functions correctly, but the bottom row, with wider details, experiences an unwanted behavior that I'm trying to avoid.

Ideally, I would love to understand what's causing this issue, but I'm open to any solution that prevents the column width from shifting when expanding the details in the bottom row.

Upon testing in Firefox, everything works fine without any jumping effects in both scenarios: The expanded details appear seamlessly. Unfortunately, I don't have access to test this in IE8 or IE9, so it's unsure if the problem persists there too.

So, why is this happening? What could be causing this strange behavior? And most importantly, how can we fix it?

The provided fiddle showcases the problem in its original setup, but for a more focused approach, here's a modified version without the javascript to simplify things. Removing the 25px margin from the innermost table may temporarily solve the issue, but adding extra cells will reveal the problem again.

Answer №1

There seems to be an issue with colspan in IE, however, it's not necessarily a bug. It was reported in IE6/7/8(b1) but deemed invalid as there are no specific guidelines on how browsers should render colspan when table-layout: auto is implicitly defined.

A possible workaround is to set the outermost table to have table-layout: fixed and define the "column widths" using the first row (.report-header). For example, remove the 25px width from the expand/expanable cell and adjust the widths of the columns in the .report-header row - they can default to auto if needed.

If necessary, you can then revert the nested table back to table-layout: auto explicitly.

Below is the code snippet for reference, and the same code has been included in your fiddle. Should there be any issues in IE7 after these modifications, please let me know so I can create a new fiddle for you.

Example fiddle

CSS:

table {
   border-collapse: collapse;
   table-layout: fixed;
   width: 100%;
}

table table {
   width: auto; 
   table-layout: auto;
}

table,tr,td {
    margin:0;
    padding:0;
}

table {border: 1px solid #f00;}
/* td {border: 1px solid #00f;} was used in testing */

td.expanded, td.expandable {
    background-color:#f00;
}

tr.report-header {
    font-weight:bold;
}

/* give first row their column widths here */
tr.report-header td {width: 25px;} /* col 1 */
tr.report-header td+td {width: auto;}
tr.report-header td+td+td+td+td+td {width: 50px;} /* col 6 example */
/* end first row widths */

td.detail table, td.detail td {border: 0;}
tr.detail {display:none;}
td.detail {padding-left: 30px;}

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