Formatting Page Layout Without Tables

Andy Dingley wrote:

On 18 Aug, 22:33, Sanders Kaufman <bu... (AT) kaufman (DOT) net> wrote:
I'm about to drop a decade-long, bad practice of formatting page layouts
with tables. I just got one question - how does that work in the real
world?

Read this newsgroup (and c.i.w.a.h and even alt.html). It's one of the
best resources around, good generally and excellent for the practice
of getting CSS good practice _right_, not just bearably competent for
one page on one browser. Search the archives. Search the archives for
tutorial recommendations.

Thanks - I found what I was looking for in the first place I looked...
after this one.

The crux of the answer was to use position:absolute.

As a few starting points, glish, bluerobot and alistapart are
trustworthy resources. W3C is correct but unreadable as a tutorial.
w3cschools is poor.

"Sanders Kaufman" <bucky (AT) kaufman (DOT) net> wrote

The crux of the answer was to use position:absolute.

Not necessarily. There are other ways.

--
Richard.

Sanders Kaufman wrote:

Bergamot wrote:
Sanders Kaufman wrote:

Because this is a news group, not a web page... and this is news to me.

Um, it wouldn't have been news to you, either, if you had bothered to
search the newsgroup archives before posting. It's the only thing google
groups should be used for.
http://groups.google.com/advanced_search

This is not a "Google" group.
It's a Usenet group.... far bigger than even Google Himself.

His point was to use Google Groups to search through the previous posts
on this Usenet group to find the answer to your question. It's been
addressed a zillion times. Well, ok, only a million.

--
Ed Mullen
http://edmullen.net
http://mozilla.edmullen.net
http://abington.edmullen.net
Half the people you know are below average.

Sanders Kaufman wrote:

I found what I was looking for in the first place I looked...
after this one.

The crux of the answer was to use position:absolute.

<shudder>

One of the best ways to make an unusable page is to absolutely position
everything. It's something to avoid until you fully understand how it
works and what the repercussions are. That comes with experience.

--
Berg

On Mon, 20 Aug 2007 20:02:57 -0500, Sanders Kaufman <bucky (AT) kaufman (DOT) net>
wrote:

The crux of the answer was to use position:absolute.

I have no idea what the rest of the page looks like, but when anyone
(excludng a list of people I can count on one hand) tells me that the
answer is to use position:absolute; then they're doing soemthing wrong.

Andy Dingley wrote:

On Mon, 20 Aug 2007 20:02:57 -0500, Sanders Kaufman <bucky (AT) kaufman (DOT) net
wrote:

The crux of the answer was to use position:absolute.

I have no idea what the rest of the page looks like, but when anyone
(excludng a list of people I can count on one hand) tells me that the
answer is to use position:absolute; then they're doing soemthing wrong.

Wow - to see these two responses, you'd think that that was a bug,
instead of a feature.

But it works... and it works on all the browsers. So I don't see the
problem.

"Sanders Kaufman" <bucky (AT) kaufman (DOT) net> wrote

Andy Dingley wrote:
On Mon, 20 Aug 2007 20:02:57 -0500, Sanders Kaufman <bucky (AT) kaufman (DOT) net
wrote:

The crux of the answer was to use position:absolute.

I have no idea what the rest of the page looks like, but when anyone
(excludng a list of people I can count on one hand) tells me that the
answer is to use position:absolute; then they're doing soemthing wrong.

Wow - to see these two responses, you'd think that that was a bug, instead
of a feature.

But it works... and it works on all the browsers. So I don't see the
problem.

Increase your font size a couple of notches.

--
Richard.

On Tue, 21 Aug 2007 22:29:16 GMT, Sanders Kaufman <bucky (AT) kaufman (DOT) net>
wrote:

But it works... and it works on all the browsers. So I don't see the
problem.

The problem is that it breaks the browser's ability to re-arrange the
page elements according to their best fit for a fluid design. It'll look
great once, for your computer. Anywhere else it probably looks dreadful.
In particular it is likely to fail if someone changes the size of text
relative to window size. Overlapping text onto adjacent elements is the
usual giveaway.

Andy Dingley wrote:

On Tue, 21 Aug 2007 22:29:16 GMT, Sanders Kaufman <bucky (AT) kaufman (DOT) net
wrote:

But it works... and it works on all the browsers. So I don't see the
problem.

The problem is that it breaks the browser's ability to re-arrange the
page elements according to their best fit for a fluid design. It'll look
great once, for your computer. Anywhere else it probably looks dreadful.
In particular it is likely to fail if someone changes the size of text
relative to window size. Overlapping text onto adjacent elements is the
usual giveaway.

Ahh, okay - that's already dealt with.

There is a presumption in any design that if you tinker with it, it'll
break - unless it was designed to be so customizable.

So if the end-user turns off or modifies the CSS styles, they *should*
expect the page to appear broken.

Normally, I would look for a work-around, but I think if there was such
a thing, you guys would have recommended it.

What is it about this industry that there's so many nay-sayers?!

On 22 Aug, 02:33, Sanders Kaufman <bu... (AT) kaufman (DOT) net> wrote:

There is a presumption in any design that if you tinker with it, it'll
break - unless it was designed to be so customizable.

There's a little concept called "Accessibilty" that you ought to look
at.

Here's an excellent resource (free too)
http://joeclark.org/book/sashay/

Now let's take the extremist anti-accessibility argument: Blind and
poorly-sighted web users aren't _worthy_ to visit your wonderful site.
Forget about them. Forget about "accessibility" in terms of adapting
your site to the needs of users' own limitations.

You _still_ have to deal with the technical variations though. No
matter how anti-inclusive your agenda, there are technical issues out
there you can't deny. You have no idea how many pixels a "default"
character height is on my screen. Which one of my screens anyway? I've
got 3 desktop screens here, the defaults (in pixel terms) is variable
enough between them to break many web page layouts, using those
techniques.

I've also got a number of non-desktop mobile devices that shoudl be
able to access the web (and with good CSS practice, they can do). Do
you _want_ to lock these users out? If someone spends $500 on the
latest Nokia 800 just so that they can go shopping / gambling from a
train, don't you _want_ that sort of big-spender customer with time to
kill ?