I would like to add an update to the post above in regards to whether the CAPTION is supposed to be subservient the TABLE box or outside the table box. Section 17.4 of CSS 2.1 has been apparently changed and now makes the CAPTION box subservient to the TABLE box. This means that some time between when the post above was written in Jan. 2005 and my finding this post in June 2007 somebody reversed the rules of how the CAPTION box is supposed to behave. Nothing like throwing fuel on the confusion.

Personally, I think the original behavior makes more sense given the explanation above. However, I just wish that whatever the correct behavior is that all browsers would handle this in the same way.

Another thing was that I was able to set the width of the caption to smaller than the table in Firefox (to make the caption look kind of like a tab that only goes partway across), but IE ignores it and makes it full-width. I figured it didn’t look bad enough to try to find a fix.

Currently, if I remember correctly, these caption alignments are not properly rendered by any current browser.

If you look at an article from a technical jounal (and I have one on my desk right now that illustrates this), you’ll see that tables are no wider than necessary for their tabular contents, but captions are up to the width of the column. And, dare I say, it would look odd to force a lengthy caption to wrap at the width of a narrow table

You can see the effect on this page I made to test IE6 and the Zoom filter (open it in Opera):

Zoom Test

Perhaps this is normal behaviour, but doesn’t make captions very useful. I’d have to put breaks in the text to make it match the table width!

It is not a really nice solution, obviously. But I do not like the fact that ‘height’ is not really ‘height’ (and ‘width’ is not really ‘width’) when applied to TABLE elements or elements that are styled as a table.

Since the CAPTION element is structurally subordinate to the TABLE element, I find it natural that it “lives” within the table’s box. Trying to have a left-justified caption in a centred table, however, clearly indicates that this is not the case in Gecko browsers. And since weird behaviour in Gecko browsers usually indicate weirdness in the CSS specification, who am I to grumble? :)

Re: border colour in IE, I think I’ve come across a similar bug that wasn’t related to tables. It seems as if the foreground colour isn’t properly inherited as border colour in IE, and that you often need to set it explicitly.