CSS horizontal table cell spacing: how?

Question

How about giving each table cell a transparent border? I am pretty sure this will do it for you…

table td {
  border:solid 5x transparent;
}

And you can only apply it horizontally like so…

table td {
  border-left:solid 10px transparent;
}
table td:first-child {
  border-left:0;
}

Here’s a complete working demo of what I believe you are trying to accomplish…

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Layout</title>
    <style type="text/css">
      table {
        border: 1px solid black;
      }

      table td {
        background: yellow;
        border-left:solid 10px transparent;
      }

     table td:first-child {
       border-left:0;
     }
    </style>
  </head>
  <body>
    <table>
      <tr>
        <td>1</td>
        <td>2</td>
        <td>3</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>4</td>
        <td>5</td>
        <td>6</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>7</td>
        <td>8</td>
        <td>9</td>
      </tr>
    </table>
  </body>
</html>

I do not believe IE6 supports the CSS :first-child, so here is a workaround for that…

<!–-[if IE 6]>
<style type="text/css">
  table td {
    border-left: expression(this.previousSibling == null ? '0' : 'solid 5px transparent');
  }
</style>
<![endif]-->

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