“But the fact remains that every browser out there has its quirks, and while problems should generally be dealt with by amending your design on a global basis, sometimes that’s not possible or practical” - .net mag.

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I couldn’t disagree more. The fact is that browser standards will never improve if the attitude of web professionals is that hacks are ‘designed to cater for browser shortcomings’.

All that happens is that the web site becomes complex (with loads of horrible mark-up) and the vendor has to keep the rendering bug in order to make sure they don’t break old web sites.

There is a really good argument against using hacks on Digital Web by Peter-Paul Koch. He also writes and maintains the brilliant Quirksmode.org web site.

I’ve been thinking about comparing all the major browsers in regards to the Acid 2 test, but I found this brilliant page on How to create that goes into a lot of detail about the acid 2 test and includes screenshots too.

In the past few years CSS has really come though and to not use it is frowned upon by peers, but the problem is that it isn’t implemented the same inside every browser. Some browsers render complex CSS perfectly and some perform pretty badly. The Acid 2 test is a pretty good indicator of how good the browser is in this department. You can see some comparisons on the Acid 2 test Wikipedia page.

Over six years in the making CSS 3 will help spice things up and make life easier, especially for multi-column based sites (like newspapers), but I can’t help but feel that it’s going to be at least 5 years before every browser is compatible… and by that I mean we’ll be waiting on IE.

Note: There is a nice web site that previews CSS 3 called CSS info.