The CSS Boxes Were Measured All Wrong

When IE 4 came out in 1997, and when IE 5 for the Macintosh came out in 2000, Microsoft seemed to be doing fairly well with its Web browsers. Not that theywere great, but in terms of CSS support and user adoption, they were simply doing much better than Netscape 4 had fared. Netscape 6 was poorly received, and Microsoft had essentially won the so-called “Browser War.” With Internet Explorer 5 and 5.5 (the only games in town for many Web authors), it was assumed by most developers that the CSS support that they were getting used to was in fact correct. But just because something’s better or more popular doesn’t mean it’s correct.

Building a CSS-based layout using the building blocks contained in IE 4 and IE 5.x was misleading. A layout on a Web page is described with elements and tags representing a series of boxes and objects on a canvas—the document body. A CSS layout is defined by a box composed of an element that has a content area; padding around the top, right, bottom, and left; borders around the same areas; followed by margins around the object as well.