Clients, those crazy people, sometimes they get these funny little ideas like: hey wouldn’t it be neat if the form buttons looked like {insert cliche web2.0 button style here}:. My initial answer to this is that the UI the browser creates for you is the most usable and least likely to create problems across different browsers and platforms

First of all - what the heck is a “pipe”? The character referred to as a “pipe” (|), in Linux, Unix, or OSX, is used for redirecting the output of one terminal command into another (ls | grep “something”). It is also very commonly used, albiet only for presentation, to delimit individual items of a site navigation or other menu. By now, any professional web developer knows that a menu of any sort belongs inside our good ole friend the unordered list. I won’t go into the benefits of using semantic markup here, but I do want to share my technique for achieving this very common menu style without adding any extra markup or unnecessary characters.

Gone are the days of the table based layout… days where CSS, if used at all, would simply be a replacement for the notorious font tag. In this day it is very common for a stylesheet to contain many times more line of code than its corresponding XHTML document. Part of the challenge of writing good CSS is not just learning the correct properties to use, but formatting and organizing your document in a way that allows for easy maintenance and speedy display bug fixes.