Table contents spreading out

make the left and right columns fixed width and 100% in the center one
both pages look fine in IE5 at 800x600

Odd. This issue is the center cell which contains the book details, like price, name, author, etc.. is spreading out vertically, not horizontally. And it's only spreading out vertically when the right column extends lower.

I want the lower cell that contains the comments to extend, but I don't want any of the text to spread out.

This was in IE6, and Mozilla on Linux.

Vertical is up and down, horizontal is side to side.

Do you mean that the content is sliding down so it's not at the top? Then valign="top" or vertical-align: top; (HTML or CSS, respectively) for that middle cell.

I can't get your pages to load, so pardon any redundancies in the advice.

Yes, it was a problem with vertical. The issue wasn't with valign - top, as the first item was top aligned, but it was resizing to compensate with the right column.

I ended up solving it by throwing the table away and instead of using rowspan, I just nested simple tables with in each other. It works the way I want it to now.

But it worries me that you weren't able to load the page. Were you getting an error? or taking to long? or something else?

I haven't had any issue in loading the pages from any locations. If you could elaborate, I'd appreciate it as you have me concerned.

If it was a long time in loading, it could have been that Amazon's web service was down. But it should show a friendly error instead after about 15 seconds or so.

Thanks

N7, OSX -- very long load. I'm on DSL, so a 10-15 second load is too long for me to wait around for. Regardless, it was over a minute the other day and I quit it after I finished posting -- easily over a minute.