css positioning

[Charles Harrison Caudill]

with tables there is a clean and algorithmic way to organize things, but with
css which is, once you get it working, much cleaner, I have to tweak and patch
and hope and pray and curse before things are positioned the way I want them.

It *should* be easy to say: this goes on the left, this goes on the right,
this goes in the center, all on the same line, with a background image...but
I'm missing something.

I would very much like a clean algorithmic way to partition things off, and so
arrange my website, as I would have done when using tables to arrange things
was in style.

Thank you

BEGIN FLAMING RANT (Feel free to ignore, or laugh at...it's pg-13)

what the **** is going on with ******* css where the **** did who come up
with the whole ****** web standard anyway. oh wait, there ISN'T a standard
because every single friggen browser out there decides to render everything
just slightly different, even if you have the latest browser and conform
strictly to the friggen standards. margin-right oh, if you say put the
right margin on the right hand side of the screen i'll just place it on the
next ******* line, that's what you want right? come ON people!! gtk figured
this out long ago, gtk_expand, gtk_fill, and gtk_shrink: expand to take as
much space as possible, fill all the space you have with content vs padding,
shrink to take up only the space required. why the **** can't you do that
in html which is supposed to be so much more advanced? why the **** are we
using html for all this anyway? it's such a bass-ackwards, broken system.
what's wrong with the y-protocol or a derivative thereof in which programs
do not even know that they're operating over a network connection as far as
the gui is concerned? why do we keep trying to build hack upon hack upon
hack. i ******* hate the ****** web, it's a total software vietnam! hey,
let's take a bad idea, depend upon it, make it worse, depend on it more,
repeat, repeat, repeat, until every ****** coder out there is forced to deal
with this **** instead of doing worth-while things like building better
compilers, better languages, better filesystems, or anything else non-lame

END FLAMING RANT

--
Harrison Caudill BS | .^ www.hypersphere.org
Physics Graduate Computer Science Major | | Me*Me=1
Georgia Institute of Technology | v' I'm just a normal guy

[Spartanicus]

Charles Harrison Caudill <ku*****@myrna. cc.gatech.edu> wrote:

[CSS positioning]

CSS should be discussed in comp.infosystem s.www.authoring.stylesheets,
cross posted and follow up set.

with tables there is a clean and algorithmic way to organize things, but with
css which is, once you get it working, much cleaner, I have to tweak and patch
and hope and pray and curse before things are positioned the way I want them.

It *should* be easy to say: this goes on the left, this goes on the right,
this goes in the center, all on the same line, with a background image...but
I'm missing something.
CSS2 supports an good method to replace html tables, but few people know
about it because it's not supported by IE.
I would very much like a clean algorithmic way to partition things off, and so
arrange my website, as I would have done when using tables to arrange things
was in style.

There is no such thing, all other available CSS methods to create a
layout have lots of potential issues and are difficult to implement for
all but the most trivial layouts. CSS positioning is especially tricky
to use, many people relatively new to CSS latch on to absolute
positioning as a method to create a near pixel perfect layout. In doing
so they typically create something horrible that breaks when you wave a
feather at it.

Start with floats first, for creating a layout they are equally horrible
to use, with as least as many potential issues, but you are less likely
to create the typical horror show that results from using absolute
positioning.

CSS positioning can be used to create pretty good layouts, but using it
requires good CSS skills and an awareness of the many issues that can
result from it, a few absolute positioning do's and don't's:

a) Typically only position the layout boxes, *not* the elements in them
(let them flow).
b) Keep the layout simple, not to many boxes.
c) Scale the width and possibly height of the box if it contains text to
allow for user font size variations. To test use a Gecko browser to vary
the text size.
d) Beware of the overflow behaviour of non washable content (such as
images).
e) Note the wrap behaviour of content in abs positioned boxes, narrow
the viewport width to test, you may need to prevent wrapping from
occurring, if so, see (d).

Search the web for examples of CSS layouts if you are not particularly
skilled with CSS.

--
Spartanicus