Here are a few resources I found very helpful in dealing with all of the cross-browser inconsistencies in CSS implementations. Note: these will not teach you CSS—there are places for that—rather, they teach you how to wrangle it into submission and produce mostly-consistent results.

The Noodle Incident's Box Lessons - an indispensable font of thorough information on layout box positioning problems and workarounds. The core layout of this page is now based on a layout researched and coded by The Noodle Incident.

There's also more information on hacking boxes at glish.com and tantek.com.

I'm still working on font size keywords, but that's another area that takes some hacking to implement elegantly.

There's a good article on migrating from table-based layouts to CSS on A List Apart. One thing I plan to get around to doing is implementing the Browser Upgrade Campaign discussed in that article.

Most of the readers here have at least CSS1 support or better, but there are some who don't. An elegant, gentle-but-not-required suggestion to upgrade would be a nice feature and help push the Web toward an age in which these standards actually work consistently.

If there's anything else you need to know, The Web Standards Project has linked to many excellent resources.

Take the plunge! It's quite an education!

A few things are a little wonky, but it looks like the most heinous of the cross-browser issues are resolved. Things are at least readable in IE, NS, and Mozilla, if not picture-perfect.

In the process, I've learned a whole lot about dealing with irksome inconsistencies in cross-browser CSS implementation, and managed to severely reduce my dependency on layout tables. Woohoo!

I'll eventually get around to tweaking to fix the few cosmetic design issues remaining, but I hope this is good enough for now. Post a comment if you're still having issues, and tell me what browser you're using.

Here in Texas, we have Republicans piled higher than the tops of our flash flood gauges. Crazy Republicans are our specialty.

Every once in a while, though, one of them gets a touch of wisdom in his head, popping up like a buttercup in a field of bluebonnets.

Buttercup of the week is DIck Armey, who is introducing amendments to the Homeland Security bill to prevent the establishment of Operation TIPS and nip off a planned national ID card program before it goes to seed.

Not only that, but he also wants to establish a Privacy Officer in the department to help safeguard civil liberties!

Did someone accidentally switch his brain with Lloyd Doggett's?

If that isn't enough, there's also yet another delightful parody of Operation TIPS, this one recruiting people to inform on the informers, and squeezing in a spoof of the "-chalking" phenomenon for good measure. (What's chalking? See Warchalking and Blogchalking)

So join the cause, chalk an informer! And chalk this up as a good day for Dick Armey, Texas Republican with a clue.

Not up to speed on Operation TIPS? Catch up in the archives, here and here.