title: Empty cells have a fixed width of 0?
body: <p>I have a table with 5 columns, 2 of which have a set width, the other three don't. Different browsers interpret this inconsistently.</p>
  
  <p>Have a look at <a href="http://jsfiddle.net/WACLY/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this fiddle</a> in different browsers to see what I mean.</p>
  
  <p>Firefox and IE9 render it the way I'd think correct: all cells have uniform width of 20% (two have a set width of 20% each, and the remaining 60% is divided between the remaining three cells).</p>
  
  <p>Chrome, Opera, IE7 and IE8 force the empty cells without a set width to have zero width, which in turn forces the other two cells to stretch to 50% width each. Putting content into one of the three empty cells makes them take all available width (60% in case one cell has content, 30% if two, etc.). Likewise, removing the content off one of the two cells that have a set width results in a forced 0 width.</p>
  
  <p>Which browsers got it right and which ones are doing it wrong?</p>
  
  <p>Also, I perused the W3C spec regarding tables, but only found the <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/tables.html#empty-cells" rel="nofollow noreferrer">description of the <code>empty-cells</code> property</a>, which is supposed to control the rendering of empty cells with borders/background, but this does not affect the cells' width. I thought the <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/tables.html#width-layout" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><code>table-layout</code> property</a> might do the trick, but while setting <code>table-layout:fixed</code> in Chrome does make all the columns appear, there is no way (or at least I don't see one) to do the opposite in Firefox. If you could elaborate on this and/or point me to the correct section of the W3C spec that covers this, I would really appreciate it.</p>