Font-size rule in table

Question

Hello,
I am having trouble understanding why a CSS rule isn't making it into a table. Here is an example:
http://alumweb.mit.edu/clubs/pugetsound.pages/table-experiment.html
The stylesheet associated with this page has a rule for body that specifies a font-size of 12px. None of the containing div's has a rule that would override this. As a consequence, the two lines of text not inside the table (the "outside world" lines) are rendered at 12px. However, for some reason, the text inside the table is not; it looks like it renders at 16px. I don't understand why this is so. I don't think there are any rules in the stylesheet that should cause this. Needless to say, I would like the text inside the table to use the same text-size as the rest of the body!
Although consistent with how the page behaves in a browser, the behavior of Dreamweaver (I'm using CS4) seems strange as well. If I click in text outside the table, the CSS Styles palette shows the values I expect--the correct font-family, font-size, line-height, and color values (from the body rule), and text-align (from the #containerMain rule). However, when I click in text inside the table (for example, in "world"), the only property shown in the "Summary for Selection" area in the palette is the font-family, and the lower part of the palette (in this case, labeled "Properties for 'body'", all the property names are lined-through except font-family. Even more confounding, Dreamweaver does not offer an explanation for why some of the properties (including font-size) are not applied. In other words, if I hover over the lined-through background-color, a tooltip appears explaining why it doesn't apply, but if I hover over font-size, no tooltip appears.
I'd really like to understand why this is happening, not just find a workaround. I'm happy to provide additional information if needed. Any help is greatly appreciated.
thanks!
--Dave

Answer 1

Yes! That did the trick! I didn't even notice that it was such an old doctype; luckily, just had to make the change in the base template. Thank you so much, sir!
--Dave