starway - 7:15 am on Jul 25, 2002 (gmt 0)

I can't help but wonder if that's thanks in some part to the use of CSS? Anyone else found their sites more compatible across browsers/ platforms with CSS than without? Is that the way it's supposed to work?

Of course, there are some issues with CSS compatibility/support in different browsers (like in anything else). But it's much smaller problems count for CSS though. If you implement CSS considering with known particular problems/incompatibility, you'll get excellent results.

My first acquaintance with CSS was about ~2 years ago while working on some site. I was very pleased to see how easy is CSS to use and how elegand the code become after it! Also don't forget about page's size reduction, sometimes very significant.
It was used for paddings/margins/indents/text properties only (though even nowadays it is used in 90% of all cases for these purposes only) and I got the pages looking absolutely the same in 4 different browsers: IE5, NN4.7, Opera5 and N6 release preview 2 (it was in summer 2000). I just wondered why there were so few sites I saw that use it.
Since then I use only 'hardcore' CSS.