Why? When I design a page, I know what I want it to look like. I don't want to have to waste a bunch of my time in compatibility hacks to get around crap that they do different.

You are asserting that the provider of the website should have complete control over the experience.

But not everyone agrees with you -- the readers want control, too, and it's their hardware, after all.

I always thought we had this backwards. We should abandon sending the UA altogether and design pages according to the standards. If a browser doesn't render then correctly, then tell the browser to fix their shit.

I realize that nowadays this isn't as simple as that, but if we had started along that path, things would be much better now.

IIUC, we _did_ start out that way. it was probably Microsoft that first started differentiating itself by adding non-standard features and functionality. EEE, ya know.

Unfortunately I don't have anywhere near the clout to be able to tell Microsoft to do that. And in the meantime, my users look at a broken site.

Then you should publish PDF's or JPEG's because the user agent has always had final say in how a page renders, your style hints are merely recommendations.