Below is an example of a menu that used a one pixel colored GIF for spacing and formatting. The objective is to make the red cells "fill" their cell space. The cell padding and spacing in the tables has been set to zero. So, if you color the cell to the left, it should butt right up to the gold-pixel gifs we're using to score the menu, right?

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However, in both IE and Netscape, the red cells don't fill their spaces. Now comes that "shim" we've been talking about. Below is the same table only with the 1 pixel red-pixel shim in each red cell. I wanted them to fill the vertical space, which is defined by the vertical gold pixel, set at 100 pixels high. We found that 44 pixel high shims worked perfectly in the red boxes to make everything line up.

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You can see that it's now fixed and everything looks as the designer intended in both Netscape and IE due to the use of "shims."