On this fine July morning, like to just take a moment of your time to eulogize what is, as far as I'm concerned, the most useful CSS trick I've ever run across. I've used this about five hundred times in my life, and I wanted to take the opportunity to address it to you, good reader, as if by some chance you haven't yet run into it.

I've chosen this opportunity, partially, because trend leader 37signals announced last week that they're dropping support for IE6 in their products. Which, in my immediate (albeit short-lived) joy, caused me to imagine a world where we could all stop supporting IE<=6, and, subsequently, in which this trick would become even more elegant and universal.

This trick was introduced to us all under the sign of How To Clear Floats Without Structural Markup. It is a trick developed by Tony Aslett and published at Position is Everything.

It makes it possible to clear floats without any unnecessary, unsemantic or hacky structural markup.

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For several years, I worked with a startup, which, more than anything else, is really just a process of convincing yourself that all the pain now is worth the rewards in the future. Or else your startup is privately funded, in which case you basically work for a corporation with a policy where employees can give themselves their own job titles, but I digress, and anyway, this was not the case for me.

From my experience dealing with people in both situations, though, I think it is safe to assume that either way, you are surrounded by people thinking about money. I did this. I inadvertently surrounded myself with people who thought and cared a lot more about money than I did.

And you know what? Slowly but surely, I started to care about money. It crept up on me. I started thinking about it. I started using it as motivation for myself and the people on my team.

I turned into exactly what I didn't want to be, and it was because I had nothing else. The hours were crap, the pay was bad, the responsibility was enormous. I had no social life to speak of, and barely any sleep. It was everything it wasn't supposed to be.

So that ended (I won't tell you how). And after a several-month tailspin coming out of the experience, I am glad to say I've finally got something else again: My little design firm, Design Less Better.

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Your public introduction to the world seems, on one hand, earth-shatteringly important, and on the other, totally throwaway. It's probably a little bit of both (perhaps more the latter). Still, you can't write a blog without writing a first post. It's impossible.

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