HTML align table rows on top

Question

I have an HTML table. It looks as follows:

<table>
    <tr>
        <td>Content one</td>
        <td rowspan="2"> Very long content right</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>Content two</td>
    </tr>
</table>

As you see, I have some very long content on the right side of the table, actually, it is so long that it does not fit into what height is given by the table rows, and so the table gets higher, and by doing that, the contents one and two are no longer at the top of the table, but distribute themselves along the whole height. How can I stop them from doing this?

EDIT: What I need is not the content to be aligned at the top, but the actual rows themselves.

Answer 1

Interestingly, noone gave the correct answer yet, so I'm jumping in to close this question in a satisfactory way.

What you really need is the valign='baseline' CSS property to align the first text lines of the <td> elements.

td {
  vertical-align: baseline;
}