What is the purpose of setting width equal to an asterisk in inline styles?

Question

So, maybe this is a typo but I came across some old code:

<td valign="top" width="*">

Was this a typo? or does this do something special?

Answer 1

This allows means "remaining space". You can use several in conjunction. e.g..

<td valign="top" width="*">...</td><td valign="top" width="2*">...</td>

Together, these two columns will use all the horizontal space available. The second will be twice as wide as the first.

Update:

To respond to the comment made below, I found the following on the W3 site:

Proportional specifications (e.g., width="3*") refer to portions of the horizontal space required by a table. If the table width is given a fixed value via the width attribute of the TABLE element, user agents may render the table incrementally even with proportional columns.

However, if the table does not have a fixed width, user agents must receive all table data before they can determine the horizontal space required by the table. Only then may this space be allotted to proportional columns.

Source: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/tables.html

Answer 2

"*" is MultiLength value defined in HTML. See: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/types.html#h-6.6