Jason notes the release of Firefox 1.5 RC 1. Turns out the Safari team has been busy, too, and included in this week’s OS X 10.4.3 release is a version of Safari (and any application that uses WebKit for rendering) that passes the Acid 2 Test.

I confirmed it, and it’s pretty cool.

(Not shown: the nose turns blue when you hover over it.)

Also of note for the future of such advances in esoteric CSS, Eric Meyer notes the holy grail of table-free design: effortless, semantic, order-agnostic equal-height columns, created by Alex Robinson. Do I dare hope it supports flexible widths? He also has a table-free grid layout, too. And apparently this works in all current browsers.

That would be great–I would love to finally separate design from code. My criticisms to date have been for those who have made George Bush-like claims about turning the corner in the development of table-free designs. All of them were severely limited and they brushed over the real difficulties involved for real-world application.

Given their history, I’m going to wait and see before going out and adopting this. Unlike many of the evangelists, I have paying clients that only care that their website works in whatever browser they’re currently using and that their bosses are currently using. Or whatever browser a complaining user is using. I prefer elegance, but they pay only for results, elegant or no.

But it would be quite a relief if true. Since I’ve been working with HTML emails I have felt anew the pain of development pre-CSS. I was actually an early adopter, because it meant never having to search and replace font tags again. That CSS works all the way back to Netscape 4.x. But it doesn’t work in *^%!$*&@ Lotus Notes.