Ignore padding?

[SuzanneB]

I have a table that uses css to set left and right padding to keep the text from the border. Some of the cells in the table have different background colours. The background cell colors ignore the css padding.
Now I want to replace the table with pure css.The but the problem is that I can't work out how to define areas like the cells that ignore the padding of the larger area.

[toicontien]

What browser are you using? Also, does your HTML file have a full doctype so the browser is working in Standards mode (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/doctype/), and are the background colors added using CSS or the bgcolor HTMl attribute?

You'll find that mixing CSS and presentational HTML together doesn't jive in a lot of browsers. Especially Internet Explorer. Could you post your CSS and HTML?