title: Colspan on cell in one row seems to prevent setting TD width in all the other rows. Why?
body: <p>I want to create a table which look like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>+-----------------------------------------------------------+
  |January 12th, 2012                                         |
  +-----------------------------------------------------------+
  | x | first item                 | second item              |
  +-----------------------------------------------------------+
  | x | first item                 | second item              |
  +-----------------------------------------------------------+
  |January 13th, 2012                                         |
  +-----------------------------------------------------------+
  | x | first item                 | second item              |
  +-----------------------------------------------------------+
  | x | first item                 | second item              |
  +-----------------------------------------------------------+
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>but what I get is this:   </p>
  
  <pre><code>+-----------------------------------------------------------+
  |January 12th, 2012                                         |
  +-----------------------------------------------------------+
  | x            | first item           | second item         |
  +-----------------------------------------------------------+
  | x            | first item           | second item         |
  +-----------------------------------------------------------+
  |January 13th, 2012                                         |
  +-----------------------------------------------------------+
  | x            | first item           | second item         |
  +-----------------------------------------------------------+
  | x            | first item           | second item         |
  +-----------------------------------------------------------+
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The 'x' is actually an image an has a fixed width. I want to force the first cell to only be as wide as the image. </p>
  
  <p>Here is a sample:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;html&gt;
      &lt;body&gt;
          &lt;table&gt;
              &lt;tbody&gt;
                  &lt;tr&gt;
                      &lt;td colspan="3"&gt;January 12th 2011 this here is just for padding to make table wider&lt;/td&gt;
                  &lt;/tr&gt;
                  &lt;tr&gt;
                      &lt;td width="20"&gt; x &lt;/td&gt;
                      &lt;td&gt;First item&lt;/td&gt;
                      &lt;td&gt;Second item&lt;/td&gt;
                  &lt;/tr&gt;
              &lt;/tbody&gt;
          &lt;/table&gt;
      &lt;/body&gt;
  &lt;/html&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>It seems that the row containing the TD with colspan=3 is causing the TD in the other rows to ignore the width attribute (I also tried using style width:20px)</p>
  
  <p>The rendering is correct in FF8. Any ideas how do I get IE to render the table in the way I want?</p>