http://blog.csdn.net/natineprince/archive/2009/09/01/4508099.aspx
100% Table Height
Occasionally designers may want to center content in a web page and they want it centered both horizontally and vertically. The traditional method for doing that is to put the content into a table and to assign a values of 100% to the table's de<HEIGHTde< attribute and center to the de<ALIGNde< attribute. Recently, that approach has become more problematic.
You may have used this before and had it work but now, for some reason, new pages you create won't center vertically. You may be changing pages from standard HTML to XHTML and now tables don't respect the 100% de<HEIGHTde< attribute. Read on.
There are a few things you need to know here. There is not now, nor has there ever been a de<HEIGHTde< attribute for tables. Scour the HTML specifications and you will not find de<HEIGHTde< among the attributes for the table tag. The fact is, table height is invalid code. If you attempt to validate a page where you have assigned a height to a table, it will fail. Assigning a height to the table tag is not the answer. You can, however, legally assign a height using CSS.
Rendering Modes
But why, you ask, di