RonPK - 9:48 am on May 31, 2004 (gmt 0)

In IE, one of the most important differences between 'standards compliant' and quirks mode lies in the calculation of the width of a box. An example:

div.mybox {
border: 5px solid red;
padding: 20px;
width: 200px;
}

According to the CSS1 specs, total width should be 250px, with 200px for the contents of the box. However IE in quirks mode puts border and padding inside the box, leaving only 150px for content.

Unfortunately there still are lots of folks out there who use IE 5 or 5.5. For them, you could put a set of quirky style rules within IE's conditional comments. This keeps the main style sheet clean, without any dirty hacks.