I assume that you are complaining about the minimum height of the middle row (the one that contains only rows closed to cells) and the increased height of adjacent rows to compensate, leaving spaces between the divs.
IE cannot calculate the optimal line heights when a line contains only lines exposed by python. The usual solution, when you absolutely cannot convince him to get rid of rowspan, is to add a 1px 'dummy' column to one side of the table containing empty cells, each of which has a "height" set to how tall the row is .
But yes, depending on what you plan to do with this, a CSS layout may be more appropriate. If this is really a fixed-pixel layout for everything, like this example, absolute positioning for each div will be much simpler, much simpler.
Other bits: CSS width / height values โโrequire units (presumably "px"); VALIGN / CELLSPACING / etc .. can be easily done in the stylesheet even if you use tabular layouts; DOCTYPE standard mode can prevent some of the worst IE errors (although this is not old, not CSS related).
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