🚀 go-pugleaf

I am getting unexpected gaps in a table -- and of course I can't leave on a long vacation until I finish this website! Plane tix become scrap paper on Friday morning!

(URL of a mockup with the same problem: www.albionmoonlight.com/tableproblem/ )

It seems simple: I want a table with cells that stay the same size on the left and top, and stretch on the bottom and right. The three images on the left should be touching, but they're not. The lowest one should stretch, but it doesn't--the middle one does! Each is in a table cell. The smaller you make your browser window, the worse it gets.

I'm fairly savvy about web design but have spent the last 6 hours reading forums and all over the internet, and still I wind up with large gaps as the middle-left cell resizes uncontrollably when that's what the lower-left cell should be doing. The bad cell's height seems permanently linked to one on the right: when I set the right one to Auto, GoLive changes the left one to Auto height as well. When I set the left one to a specific pixel height, GoLive changes the right one to the same. There are no hidden cells. Table is set to 100%.

Even the simple mockup (URL above) fails me. It's a simple 2-column, 3-row table with 2 cells merged: center-right and bottom-right. Cells on the left are set to a specific pixel width and the right ones on Auto -- so far, so good. But the table height does not work correctly in the same fashion.

And when the browser window is made small on your screen: the smaller, the uglier.

Design oddities: two of the three stretchy cells each have a non-breaking space and a background image. Every cell has a picture or a non-breaking space. For design reasons, I can't have a row or column with nothing but a spacer.gif. I need the whole page to stretch edge to edge, so I can't use 95% or something like that. The real page has photographic jpegs that align instead of the colored box jpegs in the mockup.

If anyone of you can save my vacation, I'd much appreciate it!

Thanks!

(WinXP, IE6, GL-CS)

Thanks,
Desperate in California