Browser Compliance?

Having spent this weekend tidying up the appearance of my blog it’s bought back not-so-fond memories from my web designer days of “the eternal struggle with browser compliance“. I seriously thought come 2006 CSS support would have been nailed.

I can forgive MS with IE6 being a dinosaur. However even with the CSS hacks I had to implement to get the search form (top right) to align correctly – I find IE7 & Firefox 1.5 still dispute the vertical alignment. Sigh. One of them is wrong, I don’t know which though!
Update: I managed to fix this after approaching the layout differently!

The same goes for padding on the header image, this time Opera 9, Firefox and IE7 show additional space which IE6 doesn’t. Now I’d never normally side with IE6 but I can’t work out where this extra padding/margin is coming from…
Update: After e-mailing John at positioniseverything.com turns out it’s a baseline gap