Even with all the 'warm fuzzies' that designers and developers alike get by keeping our markup separate from design, conforming to web standards, and getting cross-browser compatible CSS driven layouts out the door, there are still some days when we want to curse the CSS gods and go back to the comfort and predictability of tables. And of course it's always raining on those days. Just like yesterday. Even so, I found two viable solutions to the vertical alignment problem that has been plaguing us CSS geeks from the beginning.

I’d like to discuss a bit of my experience tinkering with re-skinning portions of our Content Management System, i3SiteTools,using Flex 2. The tools that make up the ‘CMS’ (sometimes referred to as the ‘SMS’ for Site Management System) have been built and tweeked over the past 10 years by several developers. A lot of thought and energy went in to making the display forms be able to do tricks like searching and column sorting. Generally, this was accomplished by harnessing the power of the backend with SQL and self-posting pages. A lot of conditional logic was incorporated into the ColdFusion pages to build and manage the display.

Print stylesheets can be an important tool to modify the existing layout for print without having to create an entirely new template.  I recently utilized the power of print stylesheets to solve an Internet Explorer print rendering issue for one of our clients.

The latest Windows update which rolled out on April 11^th affects every web site that uses any type of Active X control. Microsoft modified Internet Explorer so that now in order for a user to interact with embedded objects (like Flash) she must first click on the object to activate it.

When creating the look and feel of a website, there are some important technical considerations to keep in mind. Some things look great on paper or on a certain size screen, but translate poorly to the web.