Y'know when you find something new, and you've been doing it a certain way for years, and it blows your mind? I just found the CSS table-layout property, and it's blown my mind!

Browser table widths are a complete mess. Not only between browsers, but even different version of different browsers. I have a list of 20 or so common column widths in my base.css stylesheet (like 'mediumdate' and 'email'), and every single width has needed adjustment in conditional stylesheets just to get stuff looking roughly the same.

Now, with table-layout: fixed, I don't have to! I just set a column width and the browser sticks to it no matter what! It works great in every browser I've tested so far.

Better still if I add overflow: hidden to the cell, it doesn't overlap the text in the next cell, it's just gone! I'm pretty excited about this. Suppose it's what happens when you self-teach though: you often miss important foundation blocks!