I've completed a website recently for a Taiwanese artist and writer, Nana Chen. No major issues with the site, however selecting text in IE is very strange. When trying to select text in IE 6, it seems to select either all or nothing. Firefox has no problems. Here's an example of where this happens:
If memory serves (and there's plenty fo times it doesn't), if you put any sort of code before the doctype (even just <!-- -->) that will knock IE into quirks mode and the text should become selectable like normal. But I think I remember that making the box model interpretation go wonky so the sizing of stuff will be off (but only in IE).
Hmm.... right, but I definitely don't want to lapse back into Quirks mode since I've been testing for standards compliance.
I guess that's just another weird IE bug hopefully set for correction in IE 7. The thing is that AListApart doesn't have this issue and they're operating in Standards Mode.
After little play with a code it seems that the source of problem is (I know it's weird..) 'base' tag. Try to erase this line: <base href="http://www.nanachen.com/"> or (another solution that seems to work) try this (to add closing tag): <base href="http://www.nanachen.com/"></base>
Mike, I just read this thread and realised I had the same problem with my examples for this Text Effects article. I put the <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?> as the first line as Peter-Paul Koch suggested and it validates to XHTML 1.1 no problem (and works).