To hope all designers and clients will one day stop striving for tightly controlled layouts is to miss the chance to persuade those who live and die by the pixel that standards are good for them, too.

Peel the skin of any major site, from Amazon to Microsoft.com, from Sony to ZDNet. Examine their tortuous non-standard markup, their proprietary ActiveX and JavaScript (often including broken detection scripts), and ill-conceived use of Cascading Style Sheets – when they use CSS at all. It’s a wonder such sites work in any browser.

They work in yesterday’s mainstream browsers because the