Putting an email address on a website is a lot trickier proposition than it used to be. These days, the web is populated with evil spambots, crawling the web and scraping email addresses off websites, which they can then use to solicit your interest in perverse sexual apparatus or imitation Rolex wristwatches.

But for those of us who are selling something, we have no choice but to provide a way for our readers to contact us. Now, in the past, many things have been done to accomplish this: overly elaborate or unnecessary contact forms, replacing part or all of an email address with an image, or munging an email address.

All three of these techniques are unsatisfactory. First, all of these techniques are often beatable by smart spambots. Second, and even more importantly, the bottom line from a usability perspective is quite simple: These strategies convolute things for users. The easiest interface element we can provide for our users is link that, when clicked, opens up a new email addressed to us in their email client.

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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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