Precisely. IE is and always has been the standard. It's only in the last few year that Firefox has captured enough market share that the W3C "standards" have

Precisely. IE is and always has been the standard. It's only in the last few year that Firefox has captured enough market share that the W3C "standards" have any real bearing on the situation. Of course, had the W3C simply used the box model in place in IE and Netscape at the time it wrote its CSS specification, rather than inventing its own, nobody would be calling the IE way of doing things idiotic. It would simply be the logical way of rendering content in boxes.