till wrote:
In anyway, it's pretty hard to develop solely based on compliance and standards when the leading browsers like to implement their own. ;( On the job compliance never counts, because the customer uses browser X and it has to look good.
And for the love of standards, what are you supposed to do if for example you have to use _padding-top to make a certain browser behave, but in another the alarm bells ring? IMO, it wouldn't hurt if Opera relaxed a bit, or at least offered a softer mode there.
I thought you could control some of that by providing a DOCTYPE spec but I'm not that deep into HTML anymore.
Unfortunately the Standards vs. Actual implementation battle is probably never going to sway as far towards Standards as we'd like. Take a look at the Acid2 test. Opera and Konquerer both pass but neither one (especially Konquerer) works as ideally with RoundCube as some would like... (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2)
I'm sure it'd be almost impossible to get it 100% right. In some cases browser detection might help, but as someone else also mentioned, a lot of them offer browser spoofing so it might be useless in those cases.
Jim