Hi Webmamma,
A lot of this, amazingly

, has to do with IE7 and elements no "having Layout". If IE doesn't think an element has layout, it often likes to completely screw up the rendering of elements inside it.
A good explanation of it can be found at
http://www.satzansatz.de/cssd/onhavinglayout
This is why your IE7 shot looks a lot worse than Firefox, so the first thing to do is make them the same. A fairly standards-compliant way of doing this is to add "min-width:1px;" to the p css to give it layout.
I also noticed that Firefox seems to lose the letter-spacing from the first-line bit when handling the first-letter, while IE doesn't, so I added "letter-spacing:3px;" to first-letter.
These should make the two browsers look pretty much the same, but the background is still not quite right. I think this has a lot to do with the font, as it is an italic font. If you change to something like Arial, it fits a lot better. Make it Arial and italic, and you start having problems again.
To sort this, I added padding-right:11pt; to the first-letter. This seemed a good balance between a wide letter like Y having the background finish quite close, and a narrow letter like I having it finish further away. If you change the font, you would probably need to test and adjust this value.
The final css then becomes
Code:
@charset "utf-8";
/* CSS Document */
body {width: 60%;}
p {
color: darkblue;
border: 1px solid lightblue;
padding: 2px;
font: 14px sans-serif;
min-width:1px; /* NEW! - fixes IE7 layout */
}
p.quote:first-letter {
background:darkblue;
color: white;
font: 55pt "Monotype Corsiva";
float: left;
margin-right: 5px;
letter-spacing:3px; /* NEW! - brings FF in line wih IE */
padding-right:11pt; /* NEW! - accounts for italic letters */
}
p.quote:first-line {
font-weight: bold;
letter-spacing: 3px;
}
p.byline {
text-align:right;
font-style:italic;
font-size:10px;
border:none;
}
You can find more information on the first-letter class which may help you here:
http://www.satzansatz.de/cssd/pseudo...l#first-letter
Hope this helps
Phil