I am not an irritable person. Really. Not many things will get under my skin. But I absolutely cannot stand it when gas stations put the 8 upside-down on their signs. I just can’t stop staring at it. 99.9 percent of the general public will never notice it, but I can’t help but shake my fist in frustration. “Can’t you people get it right!”
Oh the times I’ve spent changing the way I layout pages, and even designs, solely to make up for IE5/Mac. I can’t count the number of times I think I have a layout nailed, even with the most basic styles, and I test it in IE5/Mac and it breaks. And for no good reason. Even this very site (CMYK design) had a rendering problem that is no fault of CSS, just poor browser programming.
Back when the web was young, anyone who could put together a web page, no matter how messy or ugly, was a commodity. Today, to do any real web work, you have to be good. Or cheap. But let’s focus on good.
When it comes to laying out pages in CSS/XHTML, I have always leaned towards the float method rather than position. But there’s always that issue of clearing your floats. It wasn’t until recently I discovered a little trick to avoid extraneous markup for the sole purpose of clearing floated elements. I call it the Float (Nearly) Everything Method.