Cascaded Frustration Sheets

I've recently been working on a web page layout using CSS. I thought, I'd create a simple layout with a header above a three column page. Simple enough. Then I decided that I wanted the centre column to be fluid - i.e. adjust width based on how wide the user's browser easy. That immediately ramps the difficult of said task from simple to quite challenging. In fact, it's a task that is difficult enough to warrant a "CSS Challenge" to do exactly that. So instead of warming my feet in the vague pool of memories I have about CSS because I haven't touched it for quite some time, I ended up diving headfirst into shark-infested waters.

After wrangling with various attempts on my own, and drawing on the designs of others on the Internet, I eventually found a design that worked rather nicely. Well, it did... until I stopped viewing the layout in Firefox and started looking at it in IE. IE is plagued by "misinterpretations" or "oddities" in dealing with certain CSS properties, which meant further wrangling in order to bludgeon the heinous browser into submission.

The icing on the cake? IE can suffer from issues when looking a page locally, which causes it to say that an error exists on a page, which can subsequently cause it to parse CSS incorrectly. However, upload the page to a remote site and everything works peachy. Chalk up another reason not to use IE.