[OneWingedShark]

The thing that makes CSS such a mess [WRT web-development] is that it works against the design-goal of HTML:
HTML was designed to have the content marked and allow the display-implementation (browser) to handle the layout. [Like text-only browsers.]

If we wanted to have a good, standard, portable way to to handle exacting layouts we should have gone with PostScript or PDF.

[re_nortex]

HTML was designed to have the content marked and allow the display-implementation (browser) to handle the layout.

In that regard, Free Republic is the gold standard of web design. There are times when circumstances are such that I have to use the lynx browser (a versatile but character UI application). FR is one of the few sites where navigation still works with ease. And of course, the simple, clean design renders just perfectly.

In my work, I'd love to present pages the FR-way. But, alas, our customers demand razzle dazzle so the code is littered with browser-specific if conditions for the Ajax, PHP and Perl components to work. I will admit that MSIE has improved over the years, with MSIE 10 and Firefox 22 no longer requiring different code execution paths at runtime.