Everything worked so perfectly (ok, maybe not quite) in IE on my current site but I appreciate the days of table based layouts are limited. Once upon a time, good old tables within tables within tables sprinkled with a few one-pixel gifs was all you ever needed to achieve layout nirvana.

Now I struggle night after night with floating div tags, liquid layouts and inline content. Thankfully, the CSS manuals have de-mystified much of it. As has the website, www.CSS3.com. And my work colleagues – again and again.

It doesn’t make things any easier when Microsoft in their wisdom decide to provide IE7 as standard with Vista. And then advise you to use VMWare if you want to install IE6 on the same computer. Oh, kindly mentioning that its around a 200meg download, too.

Thankfully I was told about netrenderer. An excellent tool for checking page layouts in IE6 without needing to have it installed.

I just didn’t realise before embarking on CSS-based layout how much of a problem it would be creating styles that worked with IE6. After many wasted hours, I’ve now abandoned liquid layouts and given up with trying to precisely position content.

Maybe I’ll try again with version 2 of the re-design…. one day.