Why does max-width behave counter intuitively on columns in a table? [migrated]

Posted by Nate on Pro Webmasters See other posts from Pro Webmasters or by Nate
Published on 2012-11-27T23:37:16Z Indexed on 2012/11/28 5:28 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 553

Filed under:

html

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css

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cross-browser

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max-width

Basically, I have a stretchy table, I want my label column to be fixed width and my data column to be dynamically sized. My inclination would be to set the max-width via CSS on my label column. However, this has the opposite effect. I've created a jsfiddle that replicates this. (Re-size the window to see the left column dynamically sized and the right column fixed size)

On my own site, I see the same behavior and it happens in IE and Chrome.

If I switch it, and set max-width on the data column, everything behaves as I want, but it feels backwards to me. Am I doing something wrong here?

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