border-spacing: 0.5em
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title>Mimicking collapsed borders</title> <style type="text/css" media="all"> table { font: 1em/1.5em Georgia, serif; border-width: 1px; border-style: solid solid none none; border-color: black; margin: 1em; border-collapse: separated; border-spacing: 0; } td { vertical-align: baseline; padding: 0 0.5em; border-width: 1px; border-style: none none solid solid; border-color: black; } table.spaced { border-spacing: 0.5em; } </style> </head> <body> <table class="spaced" cellspacing="0"> <tr> <td>Lorem ipsum dolor</td> <td>Lorem ipsum dolor</td> <td>Lorem ipsum dolor</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Lorem ipsum dolor</td> <td>Lorem ipsum dolor</td> <td>Lorem ipsum dolor</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Lorem ipsum dolor</td> <td>Lorem ipsum dolor</td> <td>Lorem ipsum dolor</td> </tr> </table> <table cellspacing="0"> <tr> <td>Lorem ipsum dolor</td> <td>Lorem ipsum dolor</td> <td>Lorem ipsum dolor</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Lorem ipsum dolor</td> <td>Lorem ipsum dolor</td> <td>Lorem ipsum dolor</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Lorem ipsum dolor</td> <td>Lorem ipsum dolor</td> <td>Lorem ipsum dolor</td> </tr> </table> </body> </html>