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Table columns, setting both min and max width with css


I would like to have a table which in the columns can stretch but I'm having a little trouble with min and max width in css.

It also seems that theres some conflicting answers around how this works:

I would like to have the following

table{
   width:100%;
}
.a, .b, .c
{
    background-color: red;
}
.a
{
    min-width: 10px;
    max-width: 20px;
}
.b
{
    min-width: 40px;
    max-width: 45px;
}
.c
{
}

<table>
    <tr>
        <td class="a">A</td>
        <td class="b">B</td>
        <td class="c">C</td>
    </tr>
</table>

Is there a way of achieving this without javascript (ie constrained stretching of columns with a table)?

below is a table of what actually gets rendered for some different css setups:

enter image description here


Solution

  • Tables work differently; sometimes counter-intuitively.

    The solution is to use width on the table cells instead of max-width.

    Although it may sound like in that case the cells won't shrink below the given width, they will actually.
    with no restrictions on c, if you give the table a width of 70px, the widths of a, b and c will come out as 16, 42 and 12 pixels, respectively.
    With a table width of 400 pixels, they behave like you say you expect in your grid above.
    Only when you try to give the table too small a size (smaller than a.min+b.min+the content of C) will it fail: then the table itself will be wider than specified.

    I made a snippet based on your fiddle, in which I removed all the borders and paddings and border-spacing, so you can measure the widths more accurately.

    table {
      width: 70px;
    }
    
    table, tbody, tr, td {
      margin: 0;
      padding: 0;
      border: 0;
      border-spacing: 0;
    }
    
    .a, .c {
      background-color: red;
    }
    
    .b {
      background-color: #F77;
    }
    
    .a {
      min-width: 10px;
      width: 20px;
      max-width: 20px;
    }
    
    .b {
      min-width: 40px;
      width: 45px;
      max-width: 45px;
    }
    
    .c {}
    <table>
      <tr>
        <td class="a">A</td>
        <td class="b">B</td>
        <td class="c">C</td>
      </tr>
    </table>