[sayonara]

I didn't say they contradicted. I am saying that they are implemented to different degrees, and that Opera is closer than the other browser vendors.

The box model differs significantly between browsers. Floating and positional inheritance is different under Opera and Mozilla builds, and it's not even worth comparing IE to that lot.

I support Opera's dedication to the W3C recommendations (does anyone know when it was that they too started referring to their own specs as "standards"?), but they are trying to get too far ahead, too fast. Browsers like IE either need to catch up, or give up - software vendors don't realise that the possiblity of a market schism is not going to bother web developers one iota.

I don't think it's a good idea to overstate the specs that the W3C issue. If their intentions are mirrored exactly by the letter of their specs, then they must have intended to put that ridiculous "accuracy or speed" flaw into table structure for HTML 4.01 and (slightly more damning) for XHTML 1.0 (a structure, I might point out, that has had plenty of time to develop in a rational sense, never mind be adopted in a uniform fashion by the market.)