On Mar 4, 12:26 am, dorayme <doraymeRidT...@optusnet.com.auwrote:
The IE team may not have realised the use of floats for columns
was going to become a popular technique, I don't know.
No one realized it at that time. It is now like a shameful attitude to
remind but the motto for 4th versions of both rivals was "Now
developers can place each element on the page with pixel exact
precision!" and similar. What CSS was thought and made for is to make
HTML+CSS a free of charges and easy to use alternative to PDF and PDF-
generating software.
It was presumed that:
1) position=absolute will be the only way to position content blocks
on the page
2) position=relative will be occasionally used for rubies - not that
Ruby on rails but that one implemented on Netscape 4.x over <ilayer>
and on IE over <ruby><rt>: thus a small block displaced relatively
some main block and anchored to it.
3) font size will be given in px or pt, so absolutely positioned
container will have predefined width, so no problem to place them in
any desired order on the page.
4) float and clear will replace "align" and "clear" attributes for img
and br <img align="left/right"and <br clear="left/right/all">
There were no extra use presumed for them besides replacing the
mentioned attributes.
This is what was in mind while designing CSS layout capabilities. Now
by looking at any liquid layout - a.k.a. fluid layout - it is easy to
get amazed of the changes. Namely we have almost complete reversal of
tools usage. Whatever was intended to be the primary tool became a
rarely used auxiliary tool. Whatever was intended to be an occasional
helper became the main tool moreover used on elements it was never
thought to be used on.
P.S. Please do not answer with pros of div-based layouts. I'm neither
advocating tables nor God forbid! :-) criticizing div layouts. It is
nothing of rwar, only a historical note of why so many quirks were
found and still new are being found.