Well, imagine that you are doing new web-project. Everything goes fine, everything on schedule (weird, isn't it?) and – *bam* there you go - the client cannot select and copy the text to the clipboard.
Quick glance in Firefox – it works; in Opera – works. IE – doesn't.
You validate the code it's valid!, you check the semantics, the CSS – it's OK.
Well, it seems that using Making the Absolute, Relative together with <base />, or rather – using the <base /> itself switches IE to some odd rendering mode where position: relative; is malformed in some strange way.
In fact, the problem is even stranger from the DOM point of view – navigating the DOM tree in a webpage that has <base /> without closing tag (</base>) yields strange results: the BODY element is a child of both HTML and BASE, considering the latter its parent; BASE has a parentNode that is different from its parentElement; BASE has one child but no firstChild.
Well, browse this page in IE and try to copy the text… See?
There are three methods of solving this problem. Two of them are wrong, and one is okay.
The problem occurs only when IE is in "standards" mode. So, one way to solve the bug is to simply put IE in Quirks Mode. The problem will be no-more. With the correct box-model as well.
It's like shooting your perfectly good leg off, just to kill a itch.
You can change some of relatives to float:'s.
So, the solution is as simple as adding /base. We'll put it in conditional comments:
<base href="http://enbewu.net/browserbugs/ie/allyourbase/" /><!--[if IE]></base><![endif]-->