Learning With Examples
Charles Nelson offers an interesting look at different approaches to learning, in the context of learning to adapt Flint to his weblog's needs. He's color-blind, so choosing a color scheme is tricky! He also decided he wanted a fluid layout, where Flint's current styles are all fixed-width.
Prof. Nelson isn't the first (or the last!) person to spend a couple of days puzzling over the vagaries of cascading stylesheets (CSS). He got hung up on positioning: when do you want to float elements, when do you want to reach for absolute positioning? These are tricky bits that confound even CSS experts; indeed, you could compile an interesting history of the changing "best practices" for 3-column layouts.