I just downloaded IE6 yesterday to fix a small but crucial problem, and noticed the same thing. To temporarily (and nastily) fix the issue, I created a CSS file with the following line:

TD { text-align: left; }

And then I told IE to use it as my style-sheet by going to Tools->Internet Options. On the General tab, click on the Accessibility button. Check off "User Style Sheet" and point it towards the CSS file you just created.

Sure, it sometimes overwrites the alignment, but it's better than having everything centered.

This is due to cascading table alignment. It appears that nearly every browser but IE6 considers a table with no alignment specified to be "left" while IE6 considers such tables to inherit the alignment of the table that they are in.

I don't recall a final ruling on which behavior is strictly correct according to the standards. But the water seemed muddy enough that the Monastery should probably be patched to avoid the ambiguity. Sorry, no, I have no idea when that might happen.

I mentioned this a while back and also suggested a movement to include CSS classes so that end users could override the display anyway...

In addition, this did not affect the previous public beta of IE6; but they 'helpfully' released a "refresh" editon on 22 June which introduced this quirk.

Personally, I'd like to see Perl Monks fixed, as I believe the new funcionallity conforms better to what we'd expect from CSS.

--
RatArsed

This problem was tracked down to the use of <HR> tags inside of tables. It has been fixed in that latest build of Mozilla.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")

Thanks for the tip! It works now, though the tables on this page do seem to have a peculiar border style now.

I get an occasional PM page that's incrediby wide and doesn't fit the window. But it's intermittent. (Using IE5)