A lot of Internet Explorer’s rendering inconsistencies can be fixed by giving an element “layout”. John Gallant and Holly Bergevin classified these inconsistencies as “dimensional bugs” meaning that they can often be solved by applying a width or height. This leads to a question of why “layout” can change the rendering of and the relationships between elements. The question, albeit a good one, is hard to answer. In this article, the authors focus on some aspects of this complicated matter…