CSS ul li image to align with text

Basics

For controlling "cellpadding" in CSS, you can simply use padding on table cells. E.g. for 10px of "cellpadding":

td { 
    padding: 10px;
}

For "cellspacing", you can apply the border-spacing CSS property to your table. E.g. for 10px of "cellspacing":

table { 
    border-spacing: 10px;
    border-collapse: separate;
}

This property will even allow separate horizontal and vertical spacing, something you couldn't do with old-school "cellspacing".

Issues in IE ≤ 7

This will work in almost all popular browsers except for Internet Explorer up through Internet Explorer 7, where you're almost out of luck. I say "almost" because these browsers still support the border-collapse property, which merges the borders of adjoining table cells. If you're trying to eliminate cellspacing (that is, cellspacing="0") then border-collapse:collapse should have the same effect: no space between table cells. This support is buggy, though, as it does not override an existing cellspacing HTML attribute on the table element.

In short: for non-Internet Explorer 5-7 browsers, border-spacing handles you. For Internet Explorer, if your situation is just right (you want 0 cellspacing and your table doesn't have it defined already), you can use border-collapse:collapse.

table { 
    border-spacing: 0;
    border-collapse: collapse;
}

Note: For a great overview of CSS properties that one can apply to tables and for which browsers, see this fantastic Quirksmode page.

Actually, in this case it's quite simple: apply the vertical align to the image. Since it's all in one line, it's really the image you want aligned, not the text.

<!-- moved "vertical-align:middle" style from span to img -->
<div>
  <img style="vertical-align:middle" src="https://via.placeholder.com/60x60">
  <span style="">Works.</span>
</div>

Tested in FF3.

Now you can use flexbox for this type of layout.

.box {
   display: flex;
   align-items:center;
}

<div class="box">
    <img src="https://via.placeholder.com/60x60">
    <span style="">Works.</span>
</div>