Newbie: How to work with Layers?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that a layer is nothing but a div that
has a style of "position:absolute;" and a z-index. For example, if I want
to work with layers, the div ID must be defined on the page (not in the
style sheet) and include the "absolute position" and the "z-index" - it
might look something like this for a left nav bar:

<div id="Layer1" style="position:absolute; left:0px; top:60px; width:120px;
height:800px; z-index:1"></div>

I'd like to use layers on my site, but because my site resizes for different
resolutions, I don't think I can. I have a gif as a header bar that is
760px wide, and the whole page is basically a div of the same width. So the
page fills up the entire screen at 800x600 and has white space on the sides
at 1024x768. If I were to have an absolutely positioned div, the position
would be wrong in one resolution and right in the other.

Is there any other way to use Layers?

Thanks in advance.

deko wrote:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that a layer is nothing but a
div that has a style of "position:absolute;" and a z-index. For

That's right. There once was a layer tag in Netscape 4 but now layer is just
a (absolutely) positioned div.
By the way, there's an article about CSS positioning in Dreamweaver MX 2004
at http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx/dreamweaver/articles/intro_cssp.html

[...]
Is there any other way to use Layers?

Why do you want to use layers? It seems like you want your webpages to scale
to the visitor's screen size? Then don't use layers?

Boris

Why do you want to use layers? It seems like you want your webpages to
scale
to the visitor's screen size? Then don't use layers?

That pretty much answers my question: If a page is designed to scale with
different screen resolutions, then using layers is not an option.

Thanks for the tip on the Dreamweaver article.