[HTML] Internet Explorer ignores TD width attribute when TD with colspan and large content is present

Let's take a HTML table with fix width and two fixed width columns:

<table width="500" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td width="300">a</td><td width="200">b</td></tr></table>

This will render in IE and Firefox as it is supposed to: one col 300 px and the other col 200 px.
If you add another row with one cell with colspan = 2, and the content is wide, like:

<tr><td colspan="2"><div style="'width:490px;'">aaaa</div</td></tr>

..this works just fine in Firefox, but in IE it may break the widths of the other two cols, although it fits just fine in the table width. Very weird.

The fix is to use percentage width on the first column and to not specify a width for the second column. In this case, you would change the first row to:

<tr><td width="60%">a</td><td>b</td></tr>

This will behave the same in IE and Firefox.