Vertical align and text align not working on cells with multiple lines and entire tables

When trying to set a different vertical align style than configured in the styles.css it fails to apply this style to both cells with multiple lines and entire tables. This is what I tried:

For entire table:

(% style="VERTICAL-ALIGN: middle" %)
|cell11|cell12
|cell21|cell22

Note that my actual table is rather big and complex with some groups in cells such as in the following example. In fact I only figured out the following example because i tried to work around the first one.

For cells with multiple lines.

|(% style="VERTICAL-ALIGN: middle" %)(((
cell
11
)))|(% style="VERTICAL-ALIGN: middle" %)(((
cell
12
)))
|(% style="VERTICAL-ALIGN: middle" %)(((
cell
21
)))|(% style="VERTICAL-ALIGN: middle" %)(((
cell
22
)))

So both apparently fails.

PS: Coloring entire tables with similar syntax as in my first example works, so I reckon this is somewhat specific to vertical-align...