I need to vent here.

With this job, I inherited a page layout dating all the way back to 2003. It's tables-based and, for various staffing reasons, work can't or won't give me the time to ++redo from start++. Which is a pity, because every time I have to tweak the layout or add bits, it's like pulling teeth. (Shout-outs must be directed to the gas and air that are FireBug and Web Developer with its 'outline table cells' function. But still.)

The additions I make to this heap, I do with CSS, since working with the existing layout is so unwieldy and I'm always rushed for time. So it's improving slowly, piecemeal. This still feels like buffing and painting the fingernails of an 89-year-old EMI care home patient (with the crucial difference that this 'patient' cannot appreciate it) and I wish there were more than two of us here because given a couple of days I could come up with a more-or-less working page with no tables at all, except what Barley imposes on us (the left-hand nav found across all bbc.co.uk pages).

Graaaah. However, I have managed to solve an IE-specific layout bug that's been catting my footsteps for some time on several different projects. IE likes to stick unwanted gaps between images and divs, ignoring whatever margins you set. Solution: wrap an additional no-margin div around the image.