Here’s one example. I’m trying to create a hanging field label, where the label exists in a <div> that has the property ‘float:left.’ The idea is that the text block to the right, which exists in its own <div> with the property ‘margin- left: 100,’ will ‘wrap‘ around it, thus creating the hanging label effect. This is the same principle employed in creating CSS-based columns, though more often than not, the columns are fairly equal. In this case, because the label is so short, its theoretical column is also short, causing a strange wrapping effect in IE.
You’ll notice that in the IE example (above left) that there is an ever so slight indentation, at the little arrow, where the text in the right column is wrapping around the label text. It’s three pixels wide and it’s an infuriating IE bug that drove me crazy for hours before I realized that it could be fairly easily corrected by assigning a fixed width to the the right <div>. Netscape didn’t require this fix at all, as shown above right, and neither did Safari — both rendered faithfully, predictably and just like one another.
Every time I dive back into creating my own Web pages by hand, I begin to daydream of eradicating at least one of the major Web browsers, wiping every instance of it completely from every computer on the Earth. For a long time, I longed to get rid of Netscape that way — all versions of it, actually, but expecially the 4.x versions. So it’s a real surprise to even me that I’m now finding that I like Netscape even better than IE in many ways, and it’s IE that I want to see banished. If only…
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