This pretty much sums up some days at the Mindfly studio.

We’re usually working, I swear. You just wouldn’t know it if you walked by on the sidewalk.

Although recently the trend seems to be more towards fixed widths or flexible percentage-based width layouts, from time to time I’m tasked with building a site with a liquid layout. Thanks to the demands of appropriately-ordered content and the challenges of having one column stay fixed in width while the other flexibly expands to fill the remaining space, these types of sites haven’t been the cleanest to make with CSS. One common technique that I’ve made a lot of use of was written in A List Apart called Creating Liquid Layouts with Negative Margins by Ryan Brill. It does the job, but it’s a semantic mess with a ton of divs.

I decided to try to find a method that pares down the div count, and makes the CSS a bit cleaner and more appropriate to the task. Lightning struck, and my mind put together a technique that feels like a decided improvement on accomplishing the desired task. I wrote about it over at Mindfly’s blog. Go check it out at Get Refreshed: Liquid Layouts with Simpler CSS and Without A Semantic Mess.

Over at the Mindfly blog I’ve posted The Curious Case of Inline Block, a mini-tutorial meant to help reacquaint people with display: inline-block, an incredibly useful CSS 2.1 display property value that wasn’t as convenient to make use of in the past due to faulty IE implementation and no Firefox 2 support.  But with Firefox 3 out and Internet Explorer 8 on the horizon, it’s going back into my toolkit of invaluable styles.

Go check out the post if you need a refresher course on how to make inline-block work out in all major browsers with little fuss.