In this table (modeled after mozilla.org template) the cells in column two are requesting colspans of (2,3,2,6) respectively. Notice that they all want to span more than one column (which means, in the case of this table, all rows are requesting to span more columns than the number of 'real' `<TD>` in any single rows [i.e., all rows in the top table want to span 9 cells, but the maximum number of `<TD>` in any row is 8].

This condition leads to the 'white gap' (in builds of 5.0 for jun04 and before).

1 | 2 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9
1 | 2 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9
1 | 2 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 8 | 9
1 | 7 | 8

This is the same table as above, but instead the cells in column two are requesting colspans of (1,2,1,5) respectively (i.e., excess requests have been 'normalized' away). There is no more 'white gap'.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
1 | 2 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 7 | 8
1 | 6 | 7