CSS Compatibility Problem

Ive been driving myself mad trying to get part of my site looking right, im using a <span class="news_story"> tag, it all looked fine and read my style def and worked, then when i came to test it in opera and netscape it decided to ignore the style def.

Anyhoo, i had another play this mornig and discovered that the problem was the name of the style definition, "news_story" i removed the underscore and it worked fine.

Is this a problem with netscape/opera or is it actually stated in the css spec that you arent supposed to have _'s in the name of a definition? and in which case has iexplore been written to to compensate for this problem.

It's a bug! Underscores are perfectly legal in CSS/Javascript/JScript and MSIE handles them with aplomb - btw, what is aplomb? You're one of many baffled by this problem, nice job solving it....

this is the sort of thing that really annoys me, having to faff around making sure a site works in all browsers.

At the moment i develop for ie5+, netscape 6, opera 5, i cant be bothered with the rest, and the type of site im running the visitors will all have a 5+ ver of ie anyway