Actually, I'm using HTML 4.01 strict, which is perhaps the most picky HTML version in existence... so I'm not doing it to cover up my mistakes

DiGNAN, that's cause of the font sizes. Either use CSS and do something like <td style="font-size: 0pt;"> or just put a blank gif image in there, that's what most people do. Create a transparent 1x1 gif image, and do something like:

<td><img src="blank.gif" width="1" height="1"></td>

Yeah, that's what I'm figuring.

But this is all proving my point for me isn't it? You're all saying things like "it's assuming" and such. You know what happens when you assume, right? So why are we saying it's IE that's "fixing it for me", when it's really the other borwsers that are f'ing it up?

When I say "make me a table cell that is 1 pixel tall" and it does that, I consider that to be working correctly. If the browser is making space for text that isn't there, why is that correct? That code is straightforward and simple, so why should a browser not follow it as written? It's just not making sense to me.

Because a table isn't a graphical element. It's a textual element.

In this case, we're (well, I'm) not saying IE is being lenient. It's just rendering it differently. HTML was designed so that different renderings would both be correct. It was never intended for multiple browsers to show the exact same thing. Of course, anal retentive designers decided they wanted that, plus non-binary graphics capability, and instead of generating a new markup language, they decided to hack the hell out of the existing one.

IMHO, if you want something to match those criteria, go use SVG.

Ah, okay. I see. I just wish they were graphical, because they lend themselves to more logical page formatting than most of what I've seen. I guess it's time to start learning the new standards all over again. Argh.

Oh well, thanks for clearing it up!

I've found that since those basic premises have changed, there's a lot more uniformity in what gets rendered. So, given that few browsers actually support SVG, if you stick with using style sheets (or something newer than that), you'll end up seeing something more regular across browsers.

BTW, to be less snarky, you'll notice that the HEIGHT tag is marked as deprecated in the HTML spec.

Yeah, use style="height: 10px" or what not...

An empty table data will always display as approx 1 font character high. I think its around 7 pixels. One way around this is to put a 1x1 clear gif in the table data, and use it to specify your table data size. You can then use the bgcolor in the table data to specify color. You dont need to make the clear gif the whole size of the table data, just 1x1 should do it.
This works good to bump out width too.
<tr>
<td bgcolor="red"><img src="clear.gif" height="1" width="1"></td>
</tr>
That should do it for you.
You can also do it with style sheets, but thats a whole other ballgame.
Z~
P.S. I attached a 1 pixel x 1 pixel clear gif, if you need it.

For positioning, I like using:

style="position:absolute; top:20px; left:50px; height:10px; width:20px"

I think it works in all browsers, so it makes it easy to position stuff, and you can even put images, text, or whatever on top of eachother like overlapping.

Yeah, I know how to do all these tricks, don't worry. All I've been saying is that tables, at least to me, seem to lend themselves nicely for graphical layout, and code like the stuff I posted seems so straightforward and simple, that it should work exactly like that. That's all I'm saying. Whatever it's original purpose was, I don't see why browsers have to stick to that way. I mean, seriously, there is no reason to maintain that space for text that doesn't exist!

But if people want different standards for reasons I can't understand, whatever. I'll live with it. It just seems illogical to me.