jbakes, This is a very important question and we are very happy that you posted it to the forum.
One of our biggest challenges is simulating browser differences for desktop clients. Let’s take Outlook 2003 for example. That client uses IE as its primary rendering engine. So if you run an Acid test in Firefox, we try to simulate your layout as it would appear in IE.
One of the quarky differences between those two browsers is the way they handle width attributes for TDs. If you take this code:
<table width=400>
<tr>
<td width=300><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<table>
IE will force the width of the first cell to 300 as if it were a block element, whereas Firefox will ignore it and do a 50/50 split. Since there isn’t another value, Firefox assumes that the first TD is an inline element.
Now if you try this:
<table width=400>
<tr>
<td width=300><br /></td>
<td width=100><br /></td>
<table>
Both browsers will enforce the width of each table cell.
Our checker tells you we can’t guarantee test results unless the total of your TD attributes match the total of your table attribute, however at this time we do not accommodate for percentages, thus you are getting the error.
We plan on fixing this but in a release scheduled for October, we plan to take it one step further. Instead of offering a code based simulation for Outlook 03 in Firefox, we plan on just rendering screen captures. So we will check your browser/OS and give you options for code based simulations/screen captures that will guarantee absolute accuracy.
We hope this helps to answer your question!
