The New "spacer.gif"

This is just a short observation. I read somewhere just recently about someone who had found the light of web standards. He specifically referred to his prior use of spacer.gif. You know the spacer, a transparent 1×1 pixel GIF you use when you can’t quite get things positioned right. Maybe you used it for filler, or putting a 10 pixel gap between two inline elements. Not a pretty solution. And now with margins and padding and dimensions applicable (I want to right appliable) to everything, we no longer need it. But there is a replacement: div style=”clear: both”. We’ve all done it. Needed to expand a block to hold a float and so we just tossed in an empty div to clear the way. Naughty naughty. I thought we were supposed to separate content from layout. But what can you do?