Now before I start a flame war, remember what I wrote in September:

I believe in open standards. The only way to protect and encourage open standards is to have many prevalent implementations of said standards.

Having said that, there are still a lot of reasons to love single-vendor, even closed, platforms.

One of those reasons: compatibility.

I had a simple goal: change my blog theme from fixed-width to fluid-width.

Code lines tend to take up a lot more space than 450px. Formatting C# for narrow columns is a pain.

I searched and hacked in vane for over an hour before I found a CSS solution.

The whole time there was a 16-year-old inside of me yelling: "Just use tables! They worked great in 1996!"

I'm going to spare you the gnarly details, but it involves negative margins. (Yes, negative margins. I almost fell off my Swiss ball.) Huge props to the folks at Dynamic Drive for their straight-forward-as-can-be-expected walk-through of fluid, two-column layouts in CSS.

After a bunch of tweaking, I got everything looking good in Firefox. I then jumped into Live Writer to start writing. I updated the cached theme for my blog. It looked really broken. Why?

Well, Live Writer uses Trident--the IE rendering engine.

After much hacking, I discovered that IE cares about the order of <div> elements in situations where Firefox doesn't. Also, Firefox respects // to mark comments in CSS. IE doesn't.

After another hour, I got things working in both.

No I haven't tested in IE6 or Safari. Please let me know if you have issues.

I'm guessing I'm one of the few who look at my blog in a browser--most probably use a blog reader.

Good idea.