Shout it loud my people: Internet Explorer is the worst browser around and shall not be used! Alas, Joe Sixpack doesn’t give a damn about browsers, he just wants to do stuff on the web. Which means we’re saddled with this piece of tripe for many moons to come, because Joe uses what the beast done give him. This is a major buzzkill because the basics of making web pages are pretty easy. In fact, there are manuals that explain exactly how you make a web page. These can get complex quickly, but they are known quantities. Until IE comes along and hoses up the whole deal because the don’t follow the rules.
Bluecigar was the victim of IE’s wretched CSS support for a long time. Let me set the stage. The links on the right were floated. Images in the main text section were floated. The date/time stamp cleared the image floats. In IE there was a strange interaction between the clearing element in the main text and the floated links, such that all elements in the main section after the first clearing element were pushed way down the page below the end of the links. Madness.
So I attempted to fix this by absolutely positioning the links. This required the addition of a wrapper element that could be relatively positioned to line up the links. Adding this element caused all floating images to disappear. Madness! Wallowing in my rage I fired up a good browser and visited one of my favorite css resources, Position is Everything. And they had the solution. Not an explanation, mind you, but documentation of the problem and how to fix it.
So now bluecigar renders as expected in IE. What a ridiculous waste of time.