actually, it's not that IE has rendering issues against the w3 standards, it simply has a bad engine, regardless of who made it.

try making documents work and parse as real xml applications, IE dies faster than anything no matter what standards you're trying to follow, be them w3 or even microsoft standards.

thus my point: IE's rendering engine can't even follow it's own standards sometimes, so it's not an issue about who's methodolgies are right and who's are wrong, but the engine itself.

w3 vs microsoft is really a completely different topic.