Aristotle supposedly said “There was never a genius without a tincture of madness” (although presumably not in English). I think Andy Clarke proves that today.

There’s a bit of a story to this.

This morning, I notice amongst my Bloglines feeds a number of new posts from And All That Marlarkey. Skim reading, I learn that that’s because there’s been a major redesign over there. So I head across and have a look. In Internet Explorer (due to some unfixable mess in my default settings), I notice a high contrast black & white, fixed width design. A little bit later Jon Hicks notes in his sidelinks that the new design is liquid. As I’m fairly sure it’s not I head back. This time in Firefox…. and I am greeted by a completely different design in red, white & blue. After some initial confusion, I find out what he’s done.

Using attribute selectors is a useful way of getting the best out of browsers with good standards compliance. It is also a useful way of screening out browsers with poor CSS support (they simply ignore the selectors)…The new site makes extensive use of attribute selectors for that very reason. Not to be elitist or to discriminate, but to demonstrate what might be done for more modern browsers.

What clever things we can do with technology these days.