Let's not be excessively gentle here: text-indent -1000 is a terrible hack (try input type="img" instead) and while I'm not mean enough to think the author deserved what he got, I also don't think we should feel overly sorry for him learning about how HTML works the hard way.

If you've been at it for a few (and I do mean "a few") years, building sites that work in all major browsers (FF, IE 6 - 8, well, alright, Safari) turns out to be not the most difficult thing in the world.