Some of the advantages of CSS3 are that you can now create effects on your page with code that used to require images. Not making calls to the server for your sites decorations can greatly increase page load times. Unfortunately, no versions of Internet Explorer available today can handle these new advances in CSS. IE9 will support most of the new features, but that has yet to be released and since it will only run on newer versions of Windows, developers will have to rely on using images to make their sites look consistent across browsers.

Firebug is one of the greatest plugin for developers to troublshoot a web design. The problem is it is only available for Firefox. So when you get that javascript or css bug that only shows up in IE, it is many times more difficult to troubleshoot with out the power of Firebug.

Luckly Microsoft has released an alternative to Firebug for IE called the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar. You can download it for free at the url.

On a recent project, I ran into an issue where the main navigation needed to be centered and flexible enough to add and remove menu items through a CMS. For those of you not familiar with CSS, this creates an immediate problem: you can not center a block element without first knowing its width. The normal technique is to use auto left and right margins (margin: 0 auto), that are then calculated based off the element's width. But what happens when you don't know the width of the element?

By default search inputs are notoriously ugly. Just look at what they are: a plain text input. But Apple had the great idea to make a search widget for Safari that looks like this:

This is probably nothing new, it's been around for quite a while, but the code used to create the field (input type "search" instead of "text") does not validate and only works in Safari. So what happens when you like the search field and what to use it on other browsers?