Do you guys ever find it necessary to make a different css file for IE than for FF? I know that even in the little ammount of work I have done I have come across huge differences in display. Now Im sure in my case its probably just bad coding, but for those of you who ACTUALLY know what youre doing, do you ever find thats necessary?

As a side question, do developers not have any sort of power (like through the w3c) to try and push for tighter rules as to how browsers deal with css? If rules can be as strict as they are for JS why cant they be for css? Is it just Mozilla and MS being stubborn?

Do you guys ever find it necessary to make a different css file for IE than for FF?

Yes, but the separate file ONLY contains those properties necessary to make IE behave and it is called via Conditonal Comments so that ONLY IE will read it.

As a side question, do developers not have any sort of power (like through the w3c) to try and push for tighter rules as to how browsers deal with css?

W3C standards group cannot force anything with the browser vendors, but they do have representatives as part of that organization. They are a very slow-moving body. Mozilla isn't the problem, it's MS that's been the fly in the ointment for years. IE7 was a step in the right direction, IE8 is supposed to be much more standards-compliant than it's predecessors.

I'll echo everything LNR said above.

Truly the more you code css layouts the better you get at knowing the differences between FF and IE. Often I don't need to write any IE specific code, but when I do it's usually no more than a half dozen lines of code.

What you're probably finding is that FF and IE will sometimes have different defaults set for paddings and margins. If you explicitly set margins and paddings FF and IE will most of the time behave the same. The trick is getting to know where they differ so you need to set things explicitly and where they behave the same so you don't have to.

Again I'll agree with LNR about the W3C. They don't have the authority to enforce anything, but browsers are learning it's a good idea to adhere to the standards. Microsoft still needs to catch up more, but it's gotten much better recently. Of course now that it's catching up with CS2, we all want to see better support for CS3 implemented.