Is a DIV inside a TD a bad idea?

It seems like I heard/read somewhere that a <div> inside of a <td> was a no-no. Not that it won't work, just something about them not being really compatible based on their display type. Can't find any evidence to back up my hunch, so I may be totally wrong.

Solution 1:

Using a div instide a td is not worse than any other way of using tables for layout. (Some people never use tables for layout though, and I happen to be one of them.)

If you use a div in a td you will however get in a situation where it might be hard to predict how the elements will be sized. The default for a div is to determine its width from its parent, and the default for a table cell is to determine its size depending on the size of its content.

The rules for how a div should be sized is well defined in the standards, but the rules for how a td should be sized is not as well defined, so different browsers use slightly different algorithms.

Solution 2:

After checking the XHTML DTD I discovered that a <TD>-element is allowed to contain block elements like headings, lists and also <DIV>-elements. Thus, using a <DIV>-element inside a <TD>-element does not violate the XHTML standard. I'm pretty sure that other modern variations of HTML have an equivalent content model for the <TD>-element.

Here are the relevant DTD rules:

<!ELEMENT td %Flow;>
<!-- %Flow; mixes block and inline and is used for list items etc. -->
<!ENTITY %Flow "(#PCDATA | %block; | form | %inline; | %misc;>
<!ENTITY %block "p | %heading; | div | %lists; | %blocktext; | fieldset | table">

Solution 3:

No. Not necessarily.

If you need to place a DIV within a TD, be sure you're using the TD properly. If you don't care about tabular-data, and semantics, then you ultimately won't care about DIVs in TDs. I don't think there's a problem though - if you have to do it, you're fine.

According to the HTML Specification

A <div> can be placed where flow content is expected¹, which is the <td> content model².