By default a table in HTML wants to do all sorts of auto-magic reflowing stuff–which is a pain in the ass if you want to explicitly set the width of the columns via GWT (or JavaScript). But if you set the CSS attribute table-layout to fixed, column widths are honored. Wrap each of the items in the content area with ‘overflow:hidden’ and ‘white-space:nowrap’, and if the text associated with a cell overflows, it gets neatly clipped.