Opera tries to force IE into W3C compliance with EU complaint; Firefox’s success may work against it: Opera has filed a complaint with the EU trying to get a ruling that forces IE into W3C compliance.
Opera wants the EC to hold Microsoft’s feet to the fire when it comes to the company’s promises of better standards compliance. The company argues that IE’s “unilateral control” over some standards requires developers to expend significantly more in the way of time and money to get their sites to render correctly in IE.
Opera is now my best friend.
Mine too. IE (even 7) works when it should not and does not work when it should. It is a huge component to the cost of executing a layout in HTML. In the years it will take MS to fix this, I have found another friend in Dreamweaver CS3. It has a browser check function that has highlighted the most obscure IE problems for me. In one complex layout I was working on recently, the feature highlighted a problem I had never heard of involving IE's handling of Z-Index. It pointed to the solution on Adobe's CSS Advisor site.
I've never understood why it matters so much. I've "coded" some pretty complex pages in my time, and while pages may not look the same in both browsers, they are always functional.
Guess what? HTML isn't supposed to be used to get exact results. It's a freakin' markup language.