If the layout on this site looks wonky, chances are it's because you're running Internet Explorer. IE does a reprehensible job of rendering standard CSS, which is what I use for the layout of this site.

Explorer doesn't render any of the site-themes 100%, but it seems to crap the least on the "Cloudy" theme. This has nothing to do with my code, and everything to do with the fact that Microsoft can't integrate simple, ubiquitous standards into their products.

The Cascading Style Sheets spec has been in use since late 1996, and Microsoft has yet to get support for it right in their browser. This isn't really a surprise, since even back in the days of static HTML, they showed that they'd rather add "bonus features" than comply with existing standards. Part of the reason was to offer a greater perceived value than Netscape at the time, and part was the mentality that since they ruled the market (or at least saw it that way), they could do things however they wanted.

In any case, CSS is a far more efficient way of managing things than static HTML. Simply put, it lets me separate the presentation (formatting, colors, layout) from the content (articles, crackpot manifestos and such). I can easily make changes to one aspect without having to trudge through the other. The underlying codebase is cleaner and easier to edit as a result.

Prior to CSS, if you wanted to, say, change the color of links on your site, that meant editing every page and drilling through mountains of code to change the value every place it appeared. With CSS, I simply have to open one file (the style-sheet) and change one value. The days of clumsy font tags and tables are gone.

That is, if you're using any browser besides Explorer. The Gecko (Firefox, Epiphany and Mozilla), KHTML (Konqueror and Safari) and Opera rendering engines all handle CSS just fine, but three versions and nine years on, IE still screws up the simplest aspects. Heck, even text-based dinosaurs like Lynx and W3M render it at least legibly.

There are some hacks and workarounds for IE, but they don't solve the underlying problems. They just slap a Band-aid over them, and that's one very high-maintenance Band-aid, involving alot of trial-and-error. What's more, I fail to see why I should go to all that trouble.

I've tested this site on all the browsers that matter. At this point, there is no reason you should be using Internet Explorer. Besides the slowness and instability, it's a well-known fact that Explorer is the Typhoid Mary of the online world as far as security is concerned.

Do yourself a favor and download Firefox. It's fast, free, secure, and it incorporates a ton of features that you don't get with Explorer (the Mac equivalent is Safari).