Style sheet precedence in table cells and stylesheets
Posted by jerothe in 
Using externally linked style sheets, embedded, and inline styles, and knowing which one takes precedence can be difficult. Not to mention, don’t confuse CSS with table, cell, or any other HTML attributes.
Just remember, that which ever style is listed last, which is can be the inline styles, will take precedence. (Meaning which style will actually be applied to an object or element).
Styles will also always overwrite any attributes that are set, duplicated, in an HTML element.
Text is shifting when I apply a stylesheet to my webpage
I have found some bugs with IE in rendering styles linked from an external stylesheet. If you have set padding in a class, with no rhyme and reason, that may shift the contents of you’re the cells surrounding the one that the class is applied. Where extensive padding is necessary to align something, the solution I have found is to instead draw maybe two layout cells to archive the same effect, and let the dimensions be the bounds for the object.
.class {
padding:20px 10px 0px 10px;
}
<td height=”60” class=”class”>some text that is really long</td>
Instead
<td height=”20”> </td>
<td height=”40”> some text that is really long</td>
