Instead of users having to print out exactly what they see on screen, you can get rid of stuff like nav, sidebars and plug-ins from pages, enabling them to print out only say the main content.

Great! So there I was, merrily creating a print-specific stylesheet for my site ……. only to find that I then had problems getting the printouts to flow across more than a single page in – of all things – Firefox!

Yes, Firefox – the poster child of open source software -has a print bug in it. Sad to say, it all worked fine in IE6 and IE7.

The details and thankfully the solution are described on Jaffer Haider’s blog

The simple answer, it seems, is to add the overflow:visible property to any of the div elements you want to appear in your printouts for users.

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.