as you said, konqueror shows that as crap
its okay in opera

Looks like the problem is with this image: 
<div id='date'>
  <img src='../JCT-logo.gif' alt='The JCT logo' height='9%' width='5%' id='logo'/>
   <h1>äéåí ë"â çùåï ä'úùñ"æ</h1>
   <span id='BSD'>áñ"ã</span>
</div>

With this style:
#date
{
   position: absolute;
   direction: rtl;
   top: 0;
   left: 0;
   width: 100%;
   background-color: #000088;
   color: #ffffff;
}
#logo
{
  position: absolute;
  left: 0.5%;
  top: 5%;
  height: 90%;
  width: 4%;
  z-index: 5;
}

Okay. The CSS declared height wins over the attribute declared height, which it shouldn't. 

This way the image gets scaled to 90% of height instead of 9%

That's weird, since e.g. in this:
<style>
#foo { color: red; }
</style>
<font id="foo" color="green">Foo</font>

the outside CSS is preferred by gecko as well...

And this consistently shows small:
<style>
#foo { width: 10px; }
</style>
<img id="foo" width="200" src="http://kde.org/media/images/top-kde.jpg">

On konqueror 4 the page is rendered like firefox.

The #5 testcase show the image 200px wide. Is this the right behaviour?

Waiting for an answer.