A headingA short paragraph Another headingA paragraph that is also short More headings of level 4A paragraph that is not as short as the previous one A headingA paragraph that is not as short as the previous one This is shorter but right aligned At last! A heading with a background that goes all the way! |
Now we have the background colors going all the way to the edge of the table (except for the first heading), but the text inside the table is not the same as the the text outside the table. The only difference in the stylesheet is that there is no style setting the font redundantly on the various block elements. View source on this page and on the previous test page to verify this.
So, now we know what is going on: in block elements inside tables, the
width of the blocks is defined by the maximum widths of previous blocks in
that table cell, if the block elements have a font-family
style defined in the stylesheet. This wouldn’t be a problem, except
that, as shown by this page, iCab follows the incorrect behaviour of
Netscape 4 and OmniWeb in failing to inherit font formatting
defined on the body into
tables. So everybody is used to defining font-family styles redundantly
on everything, so that it works in Netscape 4 (and as we have
discovered, iCab as well).