All three dates are inside a td. I want the colons to line up, so basically I want a table within a table with everything right aligned. I've tried using spans with no success. How can I do this?

@reptar you said it yourself, build a table inside the td. Alternatively, split your td into two, one to hold the Start/End date labels and one to hold the dates.

hmm, getting validation errors with a table within a table. really weird ones. like different font sizes in a nonsensical error message

That's odd - I've done that a bunch of times before with no issues. Out of curiosity, what is the error message?

Something about kid, I'm not getting it now.

From memory, that normally means either a tag has been missed out or not closed somewhere.