td {
vertical-align:top;
}
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>Table Columns Alignments</title>
</head>
<body>
<table>
<colgroup>
<col valign="bottom"/>
<col />
<col valign="top"/>
</colgroup>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>aligned to bottom</td>
<td>no special<br/>alignment<br/><p>here</p></td>
<td>aligned to top</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</body>
</html>