Those of you who are web designers-- you know that feeling you get after spending a large amount of time trying to figure out why your page works in Firefox but not Internet Explorer, and eventually discovering yet another pitfall in the way IE handles CSS? I've become quite familiar with that feeling, so often now that surprise and disbelief no longer accompany such scenarios, just mere disappointment and loss of faith in anything Microsoft does.

This time it's IE's failure to properly parse the display tag. I have a script to toggle the visibility of table cells by toggling their display attribute between "table-cell" and "hidden." It works perfectly in Firefox and Opera. In IE, hiding table cells works, but making them visible again doesn't. The reason is that when IE encounters this line:

IE breaks-- it discards that line and all subsequent javascript code after that line. That's why the table cells weren't being made visible. That's why IE blows chunks like nobody's business. And with the upcoming IE7 release failing to address this and many of its other CSS bugs, that's one more reason why Internet Explorer is bad.