Sorry but that is an understatement. Creating a three column layout is surprisingly hard and completely counter-intuitive and it gets only harder when you want liquid columns. IE is part of the problem but many of the other browsers also had their own quierks until recently.

Creating a n-column layout in CSS, in a sane way, has literally turned into a pseudo-science over the years. That wouldn't be the case if it had ever been as simple as spelling it out the obvious way and adding some IE hacks.

Even todays state of the art solution ("the holy grail") is a fairly strange beast. It admittedly gets away without the nasty hacks and negative margins that previous solutions required - but it took us literally years to arrive there and it's still far from pretty.