Caveat: I don't know jack about the innards of an epub, other than that it's built of XHTML and CSS. What I am, however, is a website designer, and the crazy kind who hand-codes everything at that, so I can sort out your code problems. At least, I can in the context of them being a web page; I don't know whether my answers are appropriate for your situation.
As Jellby said, you want to avoid tables if humanly possible. They were never meant for text formatting, and do an abysmal job of it. However, I haven't had enough caffeine yet today to try to explain any of the more appropriate alternatives, so I'll just give you a quick-and-dirty fix for what you have.
Add the following code to your stylesheet:
Code:
.person { vertical-align: text-top; }
And change your table code as follows:
Code:
<td class="person">person 1:</td>
That will fix the alignment problems. As far as the rest, learning some more HTML and CSS would probably help you there. My favorite reference website is
www.w3schools.com. I believe O'Reilly is currently having a two-for-the-price-of-one sale on ebooks, and they have many fine reference and tutorial books which might be of assistance.