title: Why does Internet Explorer 9/10 ignore column widths when using colspan?
body: <p>I guess the following code shall explain the problem.</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"&gt;
  &lt;html&gt;
  &lt;head&gt;
  &lt;title&gt;Test&lt;/title&gt;
  &lt;style type="text/css"&gt;
  body { padding-bottom: 24px }
  table { table-layout: fixed }
  &lt;/style&gt;
  &lt;/head&gt;
  &lt;body&gt;
  
  &lt;table class="question" id="TR09_tab" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%"&gt;
  &lt;colgroup&gt;
    &lt;col width="22"&gt;
    &lt;col width="110"&gt;
    &lt;col&gt;
  &lt;/colgroup&gt;
  &lt;tr&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;&lt;input name="one" id="one" value="yes" type="checkbox"&gt;&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td colspan="2"&gt;&lt;label for="one"&gt;Option 1&lt;/label&gt;&lt;/td&gt;
  &lt;/tr&gt;
  &lt;tr&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;&lt;input name="two" id="two" value="yes" type="checkbox"&gt;&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td colspan="2"&gt;&lt;label for="two"&gt;Option 2&lt;/label&gt;&lt;/td&gt;
  &lt;/tr&gt;
  &lt;tr style="display: none"&gt;
    &lt;td colspan="2"&gt;&lt;label for="text"&gt;Text:&lt;/label&gt;&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;&lt;input name="text" id="text" type="text" value="" style="width: 98%"&gt;&lt;/td&gt;
  &lt;/tr&gt;
  &lt;/table&gt;
  
  &lt;/body&gt;
  &lt;/html&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The problem: The first colum is rendered much larger than 22px.</p>
  
  <p>Note: I cannot use a fixed width for the table, because there's a variable-width-layout underlying the table.</p>
  
  <p>The third row is set display:none because it shall be shown (via JavaScript) as soon as one of the options is chosen. As soon as this row is shown, all the col-widths are perfectly correct.</p>
  
  <p>I already faced problems with col-width-definitions and IE when using colspan in other contexts - however this is the first time, that the width for a non-spanned cell is ignored.</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><p>Why does IE 9/10 simply ignore my colgroup definitions in this case?</p></li>
  <li><p>Any suggestions to solve the problem <em>if</em> I cannot change the table
  structure (i.e., I need these three colums and the colspans)?</p></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Thanks a lot!</p>