Fun with HTML and JavaScript

I've been working on a web site for a local charity.

The project has been mostly fun, with a small amount of hair-pulling. My forte is "traditional" non-web programs, written in Java or C# to read and write files. The web with its design and layout concepts and its HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is different. I have leveraged my collection of O'Reilly books and the web to overcome the difficulties.

My current challenge is with a specific browser layout issue: a horizontal list of compound items. Each item is an image and text description; I want a set of these across the screen with the text below its corresponding picture. Easy enough to do with a few well-designed lists, at least in some browsers. I can render the list as I want it in Chrome, in FireFox, and ReKonq. But rendering the list in IE eludes me. IE apparently sees a compound list element as a thing that needs a new line, and insists on displaying the list vertically. No combination of list tags and "display: inline" or "display: inline-block" appeases IE.

Grr. More research and experimenting is in order.