Firefox, gaps in table cells

[gothwalk]

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Yesterday, after lunch, winding down through a long series of formatting problems on the current project, I found some odd gaps in table cells. For some reason, places where we had nicely formatted tabular data with images in some of the cells, there was a gap of two pixels at the bottom of the cell. I flexed my (by now, reasonably well developed) CSS muscles, and went to work. Some hours later, I was still staring at it. I cut it down to a bare bones test case. It still happened. I ripped out every single bit of CSS individually, margin, margin-bottom, padding, padding-bottom, and it still happened. And eventually, trying ridiculous things, I found it.

It was the gods-bedamned doctype. 6 hours work. One line of code.