I’ve heard people talk about how hard it is to make a page look and work the same way in both Firefox and IE, but I’ve never had the opportunity to hack it out myself. Boy has it been an unpleasant experience. I’ve put up a really simple form and tested it only with my Firefox. I didn’t even think to test it in IE until somebody told me that it wasn’t working for him at all.

I should have known that the CSS support in IE6 is flaky at best, and that it doesn’t recognize simple things like <button> elements in forms. I’m used to hearing how there are many sites that work only with Internet Explorer and don’t work well in Firefox, but usually not the other way around. But now I’ve seen it works both ways, which brings me to the conclusion that there really is no evil in the way IE rendering is implemented. Some of it’s features (like DHTML) predate the W3C formal standards and Firefox by a few years and became the de facto standard long before a de jure one has been released. So this “IE doesn’t support the standards” theme is more of an ego-driven spitting contest between rival gangs of geeks than anything else.