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I worked on a new application over the weekend that will be web based and provide very nicely formatted printed pages of content. I wanted to do some really cool things with the layout on the screen, and I really hate the pop-up "print formatted" pages that a lot of sites do. In fact, in today's browser world, a separate print page isn't necessary anymore.

With a little bit of CSS styling and AJAX I was able to generate an invoice data entry web page that would never look right when printed. However, when you click print in your browser, you get a very nicely formatted invoice that spits out of the printer. There's no apparent relationship to the printed layout and the screen layout - in fact everything that is displayed on the screen is completely hidden when printed, and replaced with a completely separate layout embedded within the same page.

It's really quite easy. First, provide two separate CSS files for your layout - one for screen and one for print:

Computerworld reports that Microsoft's Internet Explorer is the only browser gaining market share, while Firefox and Safari lose.

Personally, I don't buy it. First of all the percentages are so small to be possibly just noise in the sampling method.

But, as someone who controls a large corporate network, I can say that keeping Internet Explorer from popping back up on computers has been a task. Microsoft uses every underhanded method possible to force users to Internet Explorer 8, even though I've already standardized on Firefox. I've had it reappear on Microsoft Update, already downloaded and ready to install, on several workstations I know had previously been told never to offer the update.

How can you not gain market share when you control the OS and can trick average-joe users into installing it?