Something that I did not notice before, but it seems that in Chrome / Firefox (and, possibly, in Opera / Safari, I did not check them specifically), using strict doctype prevents the table rows from being displayed smaller than the value that I 'm unable to determine the calculation.
The following document is displayed, as one could imagine in IE7 with all the rows of a table measuring 8 pixels tall to match the height of the content (which is probably incorrectly known by IE), while in Chome / Firefox the rows are 23px tall. No combination of smoothing borders, margins, margins, etc. that I found will allow the rows to be smaller than this.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD Xhtml 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<style>
span {
font-family: Verdana;
font-size: 8px;
line-height: 8px;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<table cellspacing="1" border="1">
<tr>
<td><span>One</span></td>
<td><span>Two</span></td>
<td><span>Three</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span>Four</span></td>
<td><span>Five</span></td>
<td><span>Six</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span>Seven</span></td>
<td><span>Eight</span></td>
<td><span>Nine</span></td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>
doctype , 8 , .
- , ?
.