I disagree. IE is the moving target. If you want maintainable code, it is best to build to standards, then hack to IE with conditionals.
If you recall, Netscape used that same box model until version 6. So if you'd like to look for a point where standards were broken, look to W3C and Mozilla. It's certainly not Microsoft's fault that the "standards" organization decided to change the fundamental way things are rendered in a browser.
see : http://books.google.com/books?id=ZCPWYFoWaMIC&pg=PA289&#...
"Standards organizations" are there for a reason, so that issues like this wouldn't be so egregrious. Microsoft has had a while to fix it, and 8 years later far too many people are still using an old deprecated browser.