Encountered something absurd few days ago that when I set the attribute colspan as 5, the IE show the corrupt page for me. but in the Mozilla or firefox. It works well. finally I find the reason in those page
http://www.pxl8.com/setAttribute_test.html
That the setAttribute('colspan', 5) does't work in IE because that you should spell it as colSpan which is the most ludicrous thing that I have never heard before.