I'm tearing my hair out trying to get this damn cell to stay one fixed height. I know that using "width" and "height" attributes don't work on the <td> tag. There's got to be a way to do this, right? I tried some CSS, but that shit kicked my ass right out the door. Help?
I'm not sure if this will fix it, but not having a consistent DOCTYPE declaration at the top of your page can wreak havoc on rendering engines. Decide on a spec, (HTML 4.01, for instance) and stick to it.
When I took your page's source and removed the height line from the notes TD, the only space in the cell was the amount defined in the cellpadding for the table definition. If I changed the cellpadding to zero, the text was right up next to the edge of the cell. Is it that you only want the poem's cell padded? (You can do that by embedding a table inside the poem's TD and giving *that* table cellpadding). Something more like:
<table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0> <tr> <td rowspan=2> <table cellpadding=25 cellspacing=0 border=0 width=100% height=100%> <tr><td>Roses are red, violets are also red, I'm color blind.</td></tr> </table> </td> <td>Notes notes notes</td> </tr> <tr> <td>purtypic</td> </tr> </table>
(I forgot what your cellspacing was, you may want it changed in the first table)
I put the cellpadding and cellspacing in for a reason. There needs to be space between the cells, and there needs to be space within the cells to read the text well -- but I've set those values relatively low, just to give them enough space to "breathe." However, I have discovered that, if you view the page in FireFox, there actually is no problem, and the blank space below the Notes text does not exist. In Internet Explorer, however, there is a giant, GIANT amount of space below the line and before the image. IE is that with which the computer at school, from which I will be projecting this webpage, is equipped.
Give this a shot then. I did and it looks fine in all browsers I tried (IE6, IE7, FF1, FF2, Safari). I took out the rowspan and just used embedded tables.
