I haven't had a chance to write the blog lately. With New Year (Happy New Year by the way!) and other things life kept me occupied in such a way that I simply had no time for it. Today I do and I want to try to shed some light on how CSS works in IE.

Current version of IE (6.0 SP2) has been out for quite a while. It is the most widely used web browser and it's also one of the most misunderstood browsers. It supports CSS, but not fully and some of the supported CSS features work unexpectedly. People often struggle to get a web page to show correctly in IE, especially if the page has to look the same in other browsers. Often IE misbehaves, but in many instances it's possible to get it to behave the way you would expect it.

I have recently found several articles discussing how IE draws HTML and what implications it has on handling CSS properties. The first article - HasLayout Overview. It explains what hasLayout is in IE. Why it's there. What problems correct layout use can help with and what implications are there for enabling it (for example it affects performance). It gives a very good overview of the browser's internal DHTML engine and should help you understand how to approach different problems you might encounter with IE.

Another good article - On having layout goes into more detail about hasLayout property of IE DHTML elements. It discusses how different elements with different properties are affected by it in IE and usually describes how to fix the problem.

Really, it all comes down to understanding how IE works and often you will be able to work around it's bugs and misbehaviors.