>The only thing that comes to mind is "I'm crazy only when the south wind blows".
>
>Makes you wonder, is this a case of a rusty ship (http://www.ndragan.com/pv/captain.html)? How stable can it be if it reacts to a certain set of clauses in a DIV... what else may it react to? What other quirks can it have?

Well that's why they call it quirks mode <g>. Nah, it's actually XHTML code and for the most part IE plays Ok, but it's when you deal with more complex scenarios (in this case drag and drop/sorting) which become hairy when browsers don't cooperate. The real sucky thing about this is that I thought it was a bug in the component I was using, when all of a sudden when I by accident set some additional CSS properties it started working. Background happened to be the one that worked.

The problem with IE more than anything is that a) it doesn't support some standard properties, b) it implements the box model differently than all other browser (and not to standard) and c) it uses different default values than all other browsers. a and b are fairly well understood and have well definied workarounds. c however is where things often get tweaky because it's hard to duplicate the exact scenario unless you are using the exact same styling of HTML...

In any case - it's interesting: The particular failure occurred in IE 7 but it worked in IE 8, so there are apparently improvements to make IE 8 behave mroe like other browsers out of the box.

+++ Rick ---



>
>>Microsoft deserves all the pain that's directed their way, but now it really doesn't matter what was done in the past. The key is to go forward and produce a compliant browser so moving forward tools can rely on reasonably consistent browser behavior across any browsers.
>>
>>But we all have to realize that there's going to be pain for a while until the transition has gone through.
>
>As long as Microsoft gets its share. I know I had mine...