CSS table column autowidth

The following will solve your problem:

td.last {
    width: 1px;
    white-space: nowrap;
}

Flexible, Class-Based Solution

And a more flexible solution is creating a .fitwidth class and applying that to any columns you want to ensure their contents are fit on one line:

td.fitwidth {
    width: 1px;
    white-space: nowrap;
}

And then in your HTML:

<tr>
    <td class="fitwidth">ID</td>
    <td>Description</td>
    <td class="fitwidth">Status</td>
    <td>Notes</td>
</tr>

If you want to make sure that last row does not wrap and thus size the way you want it, have a look at

td {
 white-space: nowrap;
}

You could specify the width of all but the last table cells and add a table-layout:fixed and a width to the table.

You could set

table tr ul.actions {margin: 0; white-space:nowrap;}

(or set this for the last TD as Sander suggested instead).

This forces the inline-LIs not to break. Unfortunately this does not lead to a new width calculation in the containing UL (and this parent TD), and therefore does not autosize the last TD.

This means: if an inline element has no given width, a TD's width is always computed automatically first (if not specified). Then its inline content with this calculated width gets rendered and the white-space-property is applied, stretching its content beyond the calculated boundaries.

So I guess it's not possible without having an element within the last TD with a specific width.