Nowadays quite everyone uses stylesheets to make their sites more beautiful - colored tables, customized lists and cool tag clouds. If you know the right tricks nothing is impossible, but there is one problem.. do you know which browsers your visitors have? Of course not! And speaking from usability not only standard conform stylesheets and (x)HTML structure is necessary, but also a browser-spanning steady behaviour.

CSS3 is in the works, while CSS2.1 still isn’t completely integrated in all the common browsers. Some even have problems with CSS2 specifications. So what to do..? At first if you want to know how good your browser renders the different CSS commands, have a look at the Acid-Testpage. This week a new test, including a lot of CSS3 commands, has been published. While no final-version of the most popular browsers achieves more than 50 percent, some nightly builds obtain good results. This doesn’t mean that it is impossible to create equal looking sites for any browser, but it shows you how different they interpret/not interpret each command. Always the best thing is to compare your sites in different browsers and if necessary make use of some hacks.

Here you can find more help with CSS and standards:

• Quirksmode.org, CSS compatibility list with many examples
• Noupe.com, 7 CSS Hacks for pixel perfect design
• W3.org, the official site for Cascading Style Sheets specifications

Internet Explorer 8
This week the first official beta version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 has been released. It covers a lot of new features like eBay integration, better AJAX support and standard compliance. Explicitly the last point, standard compliance, is a hot topic when it comes to the IE. All past versions had pretty much problems with displaying CSS correctly. So the announcement that IE8 passes the Acid 2 test was a big surprise.