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> Table rows, trs, cannot be styled unless you set border-collapse: separate; on the parent table.

I don't recall any trouble applying styles to tr elements without having to do anything special to the parent table.

Setting the border-collapse to "collapse" explicitly just to test:

What am I missing here?

Apologies for this, I was trying to be brief and lost most of the meaning in that one last night. I've updated it to better communicate the potential problem folks can run into.

Aha! Your clarification makes a lot of sense. Thanks!

It looks like Chrome's default user agent stylesheet defaults table border-collapse to separate. So you don't necessarily have to set it, but it's required and will potentially confound you if you use a css reset that changes this.

The initial value of 'border-collapse' in the absence of any user/document/UA styles is "separate". See http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/tables.html#propdef-border-collap...

If you have a "CSS reset" that resets it to a non-initial value, that seems like a bug in that "CSS reset", no?

Ah. Well I hadn't checked the spec; I just meant that in my 5 minute testing it appeared that chrome set border-collapse to separate by default, which would explain why the parent commenter didn't ever have to set it to see table styles.

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