Keith Devens .com

Entry 1437

Table-less web design with CSS

I'm (still) trying to figure out how to update my website to not use tables. Mark Pilgrim was nice enough to get back to me, and he gave me some advice, but I don't think it's enough to allow me to reproduce my current design with no tables.

If I find anything on the web that helps I'll post it here.

WebReference.com: Advanced CSS Layouts: Step by Step - this looks like it might actually tell me what I want. I'm surprised, I didn't think it would be possible.

Glish.com: CSS Layout Techniques, a very useful resource.

Westciv.com: Positioning with CSS2 - a pretty good explanation of, well, positioning in CSS2. Though, to me, the specs were clearer.

BlueRobot: The Layout Reservoir. They have examples of two column and three column layouts. Their layouts illustrate what I wanted to avoid. Getting the three column layout was never a problem. Getting the three columns to be the same height, was. As you'll notice in their three column layout, the three columns are different heights (they don't line up on the bottom). Somehow (I still have to read it in detail), the WebReference article seemed to avoid this problem with nested DIVs.

Web Nouveau. Here are a whole bunch of CSS designs. Here's a site I found from there that I thought had done what I wanted, but it turns out he didn't. I didn't analyze the code enough to find out exactly why he didn't, but it's not what I wanted. Also, here's a really complex layout which uses no tables, Big Baer "the Urban Alternative Music Magazine". They too seem to have done what the WebReference article accomplished (but I haven't checked their code yet to see if they did it in the same way).

Lastly, here are two articles from A List Apart which I haven't gotten to read in detail yet to see if I can really learn something, but they seem generally useful, and if I post them here I'll be able to go back to them A CSS REDESIGN IN FIVE EASY PAGES, and Practical CSS Layout Tips, Tricks and Techniques.

Finally, I don't know enough yet to be sure, but after reading the CSS2 spec and seeing how Mozilla actually renders some of it, I think the developers have interpreted the standard wrong. Of course, I'm probably wrong, since they're very smart people and they've spent more time looking at it than I have, but then again, they have come to see my side of things before. I plan to post more after I do some more research.

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00:24 (utc-5)
edited: 03:01 (utc-5)