I managed to get the new mikel dot org design working, more or less. But really more or less. It appears perfectly in both IE5/Mac and IE 5.5 Win. It appears OK in Netscape 6.2. The whole thing is very weird though. It started working when I commented out all the margin variables and nested the bottom two divs inside the div containing the top content (the title graphic etc.). Then I used top and left positioning to put up the main text div. Fair enough. The positioning worked OK at the top and left.
Now the funny part. I didn’t want to specify a width for the main text div, as I want the site to be perfectly fluid. When I set a right position it worked perfectly in IE 5.5/Win. It didn’t work at all in IE5/Mac. So just for kicks I put in a “margin-right” as well. Suddenly it worked perfectly in IE on both platforms (which I don’t think it should do). Only Netscape does things as I would expect, which is to start the margin x pixels over from where the right edge is supposed to be (from where “right: #px” tells it to start counting).
Anyhow, it validates as valid CSS now, and the content is very readable on the platforms that I’ve tested it on, so I’m going to implement it in the next few days. If anyone can set me straight on my CSS foibles, however, I would really appreciate it.