IE8 doesn't like my new design, but it's only in beta

I was taking a look at the new design of coldacid.net in IE8 beta 1, simply to find that it doesn't look right with the new rendering engine. Putting the browser into IE7 emulation mode, it comes out looking just fine, however, and I already knew that it works with Firefox 2 and 3. It's pretty interesting. Likely things will work just fine by the time IE8 final rolls out, especially given that the site (or at least the front page of it) is nearly perfect HTML and CSS (and the only validation errors wouldn't affect the rendering anyway).

I think that the issue is simply due to the fact that Microsoft is practically rewriting the IE rendering engine to make it more standards compliant. And as many have already said, the changes are likely to break a bunch more websites, even some that have already updated to match IE7's rendering engine. Right now, the new engine is in beta, and so some of the CSS features that the current design uses aren't implemented, at least not properly.

When beta 2 comes out in August, I'll see if it does a better job of rendering the site. I'm pretty sure it will. In the meantime, if you are using the IE8 beta, you might want to keep it in Emulate IE7 mode when not actively testing sites.