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Can rowspans and colspans be safely used when designing table-based HTML emails?

I have been told that they don't display correctly in Outlook 2007 and that tables must be nested in order to provide different size cells for layout.

Can anybody help or provide any links? Thanks

KemanoThief
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2 Answers2

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Colspans are usually safe to use. Stay away from rowspans.

Your best option is to nest a new table within a cell instead of doing rowspans or colspans.

timroman
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  • Thanks very much. Why is this? – KemanoThief Jan 22 '11 at 18:04
  • Microsoft Outlook renders HTML with their own Word engine. Most other inbox render with Webkit or something similar to it. So by designing your HTML for the weakest HTML rendering, you can be assured it will display properly in all formats. – timroman Jan 24 '11 at 18:40
  • Nesting another table in the header cell will not keep the header cells aligned with the body cells – Alex G Jan 08 '15 at 12:07
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The problem is, that BlackBerry Browser 4.2 does not support nested tables. http://docs.blackberry.com/en/developers/deliverables/1143/browser_devguide.pdf page 42.

Tables: The browser supports tables. Users can turn on HTML table support to properly display tables that fit within the screen width of the device. Larger tables ar e split apart with the table cells displayed in vertical sequence. Tables cannot be nested within each other. You should test tables thoroughly in the BlackBerry Br owser to verify that they display appropriately on the device.

Community
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Kedan
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    Welcome to Stack Overflow. Great first answer, but can you expand on this with an excerpt from the guide? If the link goes dead, then we miss out on that extra information that makes your answer – eggy Sep 12 '13 at 07:07