>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.

That really IS hairy - and makes you wonder how many other things may lurk in the murk. You got this one to start working by lucky accident. How many will actually stop working by a similar accident. Just think about it - in most web teams, designers are not the same guys as programmers, and most often work independently. The programmer may well be on a different project when the owner decides to call the designer to tweak something, and then BANG, a minor change in the CSS causes errors in code? Scary.

>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.

Probably the most annoying thing about most of Microsoft's software is that I can't get myself to think their way (I am not a lawyer ;), so the things they think merit configurability almost invariably end up with wrong defaults. Just last weekend I had an accident (see blog) and after reinstalling XP I counted the windows explorer display settings - about 75% of the checkboxes had wrong settings, IMO.

>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.

I do hope the light at the end of the tunnel is not a train coming.