Lost in the past few years of IE6 based stagnation (and ensuing developer angst) is the fact that the Internet Explorer team have come up with some pretty cool enhancements to the way we build web sites over the past ten plus years.

So, while we're cheering on Firefox's growing market share, hesitantly eying IE8 and waiting for the ugly stepchild of the browser landscape, IE6, to finally die a painful (and hopefully immediate) death, I thought I'd lay out some of the innovations introduced by Internet Explorer to remind us of relatively positive days gone by*.

As a fun exercise, while you're reading this, compare these innovations to the black hole left in the web development world by the long and terrible reign of IE6. It's an interesting juxtaposition of help vs. harm. Here's hoping future versions of the browser continue to trend closer to the "help" line as IE7 has and IE8 appears to be doing**
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Google Doctype, as introduced by Mark Pilgrim:

The open web is the web built on open standards: HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and more. The open web is a beautiful soup of barely compatible clients and servers. It comprises billions of pages, millions of users, and thousands of browser-based applications. You can access the open web with open source and proprietary browsers, on open source and proprietary operating systems, on open source and proprietary hardware.

Google has built its business here, on the open web, and we want to help you build here too. To that end, we are happy to announce the formation of an encyclopedia for web developers, by web developers: Google Doctype.

Google Code Blog: Introducing Google Doctype

Personally, I'm excited by this development (both practically and philosophically) and will likely contribute wherever it makes sense for me to lend a hand. Looking at it quickly some of the HOWTO information is already very useful (the web security information especially) and it will only improve with time as more and more dedicated people get involved with the project.

Why do such a thing? For fun, of course- and to expand on a point I made today at work…

Some background- I'm working with a new guy who is not so savvy to modern HTML/CSS layout techniques and today, while talking to him about some potential techniques he might use for an upcoming site, I remarked – "With CSS you can make practically any element do whatever you need it to do, so don't always assume you need to wrap things in a DIV* to make a layout work." The point related to the dangers of DIV-itis and my desire** to pare down markup to its absolute (meaningful) minimum. But it also illustrates a basic idea that, once fully understood, opens up all sorts of options for problem-solving.

So, anyway, chewing on the exchange on my way home from work I was struck with the idea of doing a simple three column layout using nothing but an Unordered List. My original comment was about a UL used as a menu and tweaking it to behave like a bunch of divs (which was his original idea for the menu) or something, so I thought it might be interesting to go all out use a UL for the entire layout, tweaking the LIs in a whole bunch of different ways to suit my needs. If that doesn't illustrate my point, nothing will.
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There's absolutely nothing groundbreaking about the following code sample. People (who are lucky enough to have more time to mess around) have been doing this sort of experimentation for a while now. Thing is, this one is so simple and so plainly useful I just have to toss it out there for your (my?) enjoyment.
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I'm constantly trying to come up with little markup patterns that make semantic sense and make it easier for me to create requested layouts without having to resort to a bunch of extra classes and IDs.

One common design element that I've been bothered by recently* but haven't sat down and figured out looks like this:

Today I took a step back** and came up with this to represent it:

<dl>
<dt>Sessions focus on:</dt>
<dd>
<ul>
<li>Configuring, tuning and understanding hardware servers and software applications</li>
<li>Client side issues related to Mac OS X computing and management</li>
<li>Integration with PSx, UNIX, Telephony and other environments </li>
<li>Managing Macs in an enterprise environment</li>
<li>A Jump start for admin newbies</li>
<li>Best Practices for 3rd Party Tools IntegrationM</li>
</ul>
</dd>
</dl>

Which feels just about right to me- it captures the relationship between the lead-in (the lead in being the term defined) and the list (the list being the definition of the lead-in), and would allow me to style the whole thing with no additional markup.

I'll just go ahead and file that one away.

*I've seen it on four or five different sites I've built in the past year and not so often before that. So up until recently it was never enough of a recurring pattern for me to even worry about.

**amazingly, since this markup will end up on a Drupal site. It's a wonder I even bothered since Drupal is pretty much on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from my minimalist coding style.