[thelist] ie and gecko break the page, opera 8 didn't

[VOLKAN ÖZÇELİK]

> 
> i had a negative margin set for a div to position it.  when i zoomed the
> text, the negative div broke the design (crawling up the page) in all of
> the browsers except opera 8.  the page stayed together and resized in
> relation to all of the elements.  margins and text increased
> proportionately instead of disproportionately like in the other browsers.
> 

Most of the time the CSS support of opera rocks. And if you can make
something display properly on opera, generally it displays well on
ie,mozilla,safari etc. Though Opera may seldomly not behave as
expected (or as standards state) and cause some headache, I admit.

However, the most head-aching part of Opera is not CSS. It is JS (and
DOM) support. But imho version8-beta of it adequately supports js and
DOM.

In short, opera is enhancing at a good pace and it's a good browser to
consider.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a mozilla fan as well. However when designing
cross-browser sites Opera is generally ignored or given less attention
than mozilla or IE.
We shoud be as kind to Opera as we are to other browsers.

> it would be wonderful if we could eliminate
> hacks in the future by developing products that behaved the same. 

Personally, I do not try to do css-hacks unless I ultimately need
them. This way, the sites I design may not be pixel-precision
identical in all browsers, however I can tolerate say 10-20px
positioning difference due to the different box-model implementations
across browsers. One day (hopefully before apocalypse) all css
implementations will approach to a certain standard and we won't need
any hacks at all.

Here is my reasoning on real-world issues:
if my client insists on "pixel-precision", I prefer layout-tables. 
If my client insists on pixel precision, seo, standarts-compliance,
and css-based design: I say that "they will not go to the same basket,
but we'll do our best to suit your needs" (customers are always right
huh? :) )
Only then I start thinking of hacks.

Cheers,
Volkan.