Slashdot Mirror

Like http://www.glish.com/css/7.asp, http://saila.com/webdesign/layouts, ...

http://www.google.com/search?q=three+column+based+layout+with+CSS&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

You could always use "the Google" to find some...

This one appears to behave nicely, is liquid, and while it DOES use the IE 5 stylesheet hack, that offends my sensibilities less than the overbroad hack that is table-based layout.

Here is another. There are others.

You could always use "the Google" to find some...

This one appears to behave nicely, is liquid, and while it DOES use the IE 5 stylesheet hack, that offends my sensibilities less than the overbroad hack that is table-based layout.

Here is another. There are others.

Very. e.g. 3 columns, 2 fixed, one fluid.

The "rules" are stupid. Do you know how hard it is to make a 3-column or 4-column content site using CSS 1.0?

Nice strawman. CSS 1.0 was 11 years ago. Do you know how hard it is to make a 4-column table using HTML 2.0, which was the HTML standard 11 years ago?

(Hint: HTML 2.0 didn't have tables.)

4 columns in CSS is trivial, if you don't limit yourself to what CSS was like 11 years ago.

Here's one method:
http://alistapart.com/articles/holygrail

Here's another:
http://www.glish.com/css/7.asp

But yeah, it's hard. Lot's of people have found solutions to the problems, though. Even if it is cumbersome, I think it's better than visual markup.

http://glish.com/css/7.asp

Googling *CSS layouts* gets me this on the 2nd hit: http://glish.com/css/7.asp

Mix and match the different techniques to your heart's content.

Just my .02 ..
As a college student who has spent the past few years learning "web design" on my own, I'd like to offer a few observations.

1. Design is roughly 80% CSS and 20% HTML.

2. Forget WYSIWYG, I still use notepad

3. Don't feel bad if you have to learn by copying other people's work. Just don't 'release' it, obviously.

4. Don't buy a book, don't take a class - you'll probably learn faster and better on a computer.
http://www.alistapart.com/
http://www.dezwozhere.com/links.html
http://glish.com/css/
http://www.csszengarden.com/

5. 'web design' falls somewhere between graphic design (conveying ideas with static images, logos) and creating software (in terms of usability). It needs to look pretty and all, but that's subjective, and you should never let your bells & whistles get in the way of the message you're trying to convey. (and they typically do)

6. Tables should only be used for tabular data
I think that's about it, good luck.

• css/edge
• Glish CSS Layout Techniques
• Position Is Everything
• stu nicholls | CSS PLaY | CSS layouts
• A List Apart
• CSS Discuss

I came across these interesting articles some time ago. Your post reminded me of them.

No Tables
2 Column
3 Column

I don't think this negates your point. Even though the solutions are fairly simple, they aren't obvious (until after you see them of course).

I came across these interesting articles some time ago. Your post reminded me of them.

No Tables
2 Column
3 Column

I don't think this negates your point. Even though the solutions are fairly simple, they aren't obvious (until after you see them of course).

I came across these interesting articles some time ago. Your post reminded me of them.

No Tables
2 Column
3 Column

I don't think this negates your point. Even though the solutions are fairly simple, they aren't obvious (until after you see them of course).

i agree. just see this example. the grandparent is a moron.

When I developed a quick and dirty table-less CSS-based website using the sample code from glish, I always wondered why our beloved Slashdot is still using tables for layout. I couldn't be happier than I am to find that new code does away with those overused TABLE tags. Way to go!

http://www.csszengarden.com/ http://www.alvit.de/handbook/ http://www.wpdfd.com/editorial/basics/index.html http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/ http://css.maxdesign.com.au/listamatic/ http://www.cssvault.com/ http://glish.com/css/home.asp http://webhost.bridgew.edu/etribou/layouts/index.h tml http://www.positioniseverything.net/ http://www.stylegala.com/

#centercontent {
background:#fff;
margin-left: 199px;
margin-right:199px;
border:1px solid #000; /*
IE5x PC mis-implements the box model. Because of that we sometimes have
to perform a little CSS trickery to get pixel-perfect display across browsers.
The following bit of code was proposed by Tantek Celik, and it preys upon a CSS
parsing bug in IE5x PC that will prematurly close a style rule when it runs
into the string "\"}\"". After that string appears in a rule, then, we can override
previously set attribute values and only browsers without the parse bug will
recognize the new values. So any of the name-value pairs above this comment
that we need to override for browsers with correct box-model implementations
will be listed below.

We use the voice-family property because it is likely to be used very infrequently,
and where it is used it will be set on the body tag. So the second voice-family value
of "inherit" will override our bogus "\"}\"" value and allow the proper value to
cascade down from the body tag.

The style rule immediately following this rule offers another chance for CSS2
aware browsers to pick up the values meant for correct box-model implementations.
It uses a CSS2 selector that will be ignored by IE5x PC.

Read more at http://www.glish.com/css/hacks.asp
*/

voice-family: "\"}\"";
voice-family: inherit;
margin-left: 201px;
margin-right:201px;
}

I wasn't able to do CSS layouts properly until I came across this site.

CSS layout techniques

display: inline-table was the most recent lacking I've run into. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18217 . It's been on bugzilla since 1999 :(. Effects like http://glish.com/css/1.asp are basically impossible if you slap a table width="100%" in the body next to the right side menu.

How do you suggest I make the columns in pure XHTML/CSS?

You can create columns in a CSS based layout using a combination of float and margin:

http://glish.com/css/9.asp
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fauxcolumns/

Have a look at CSS Zen Garden for more design ideas. I think you'll find CSS and XHTML are quite flexible enough to do what you need to do.

• glish
• Eric Meyer's CSS/edge
• Owen Brigg's Little Boxes
• Blue Robot's The Layout Reservoir
• CSS Zen Garden
• MezzoBlue

For everything I've seen, Firefox supports CSS much better than IE. Like a sibling said, IE has become the bane of CSS, hindering true development in a number of ways. Entire websites are devoted to making CSS compliant sites work with IE, not Firefox.

Observe:

1. css/edge
2. glish.com : CSS layout techniques
3. Flash of Unstyled Content (FOUC)
4. The Layout Reservoir - BlueRobot

Well, you need to read more then. All that you state is quite easy to impliment.

Here:
blue robot
glish
a list apart
box lessons
css panic guide
design rant

http://glish.com/css/

I would strongly recommend Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web, by Hakon Wium Lie and Bert Bos. Despite the fact that this book is a couple of years old, it's written by a couple of the guys who designed the original CSS spec, and really gives a terrific overview of the language, example layouts, and strong reference. It's fairly platform-agnostic, and as such concentrates on what works in CSS rather than what doesn't work in certain browsers. As the standards compliance of new browsers improves, this book gets better and better.

Learn CSS from this book, then for those pesky browsers, use the Web for the timely info (bug charts, hacks, etc.)

Having said that, CSS makes it difficult to do some things that tables can do easily (columnar layout), which is why many people still use very simple tables for basic layout, without going to the extremes of spacer gifs, multiply-nested tables, etc.

Good luck trying to get ANY consistency if you really want to separate info and content!
I have written sites with CSS for layout instead of Tables as the W3C recommends. It does not render consistently in ANYTHING. IE6SP1 displays it differently from IE6, IE5 (SP1,2), IE4 and Opera's CSS support is lacking. I've checked the page in Phoenix and it renders fairly well.

For more information, I've saw a good tutorial on CSS stuff at Glish.com

Here's an excellent tutorial on how to get some common layouts without using tables for layouts. It's a little tricky at first but entirely possible. I've built my last three sites using no tables.

It's totally possible to create great looking tableless, liquid, three-column layout using CSS.

These sites have different tutorials for various column combinations and even backwards compatibility with Netscape 4.

http://www.glish.com/css
http://www.saila.com/usage/layouts
http://homepage.mac.com/realworldstyle
http://www.projectseven.com/whims/cssp_3box/3boxno script.htm

The beauty of not using tables is that you're seperating structure from presentation. Basically, around some content, you specify what it is (structure). In the case of Slashdot's side navigation, in the XHTML/HTML you'd might surround the content with a DIV tag and give it an id/class of "sidenavigation".

With tables, you're already forced to predetermine that you want to use it on the left column when you mark up the whole table in TD and TR tags.

So how's CSS better than tables? Well, once you've defined the structure in XHTML/HTML, you can use CSS to define the presentation to say, I want anything tagged as a "sidenavigation" to be a vertical box on the left side that's X pixels wide.

This presentation can be easily be altered by changing the CSS. You can tell CSS to move things to the right, maybe center it or whatever. And you can define a CSS specifically for handhelds. You can tell it to hide data, change font sizes, redefine colors, or anything you want. For the sight-impared, you could define the CSS to display it all in a simple, column-less layout. And since you have not predetermined the presentation in the HTML, the user could have defined their own stylesheets to override your CSS to present the content in the way they want it.

With HTML and CSS (and also the XML and XSLT recommendations), websites can be so much more flexible.

Take a look at this, this and this for ideas about using CSS and honest-to-goodness standards-compliant no-frills HTML in a totally cross-browser fashion, and getting some really nice layouts into the bargain.

I'm not sure what the previous comment about webstandards.org wanting everyone to live on the bleeding edge of stylesheets was about, or if it was just plain wrong. The point of stylesheets is that when you use them properly, the page will display on any browser. Older browsers will just ignore the stylesheet and do a fine job of giving a mostly plain-text display. The only problem is a couple of mid-way browsers that think they understand stylesheets and don't. But there are techniques to avoid these problems.

I'm certain that this is the way forwards.

1. Go create a new account at http://www.blogger.com (unless you want me to mess with your real account), check "rememeber me" when you log on.
2. Create a new blog, enter you FTP password if you want me to be able to actually publish changes I make.
3. Add a blog entry that says you want me (Eric Costello) to add an entry to prove I was there.
4. Go to http://www.glish.com/cookies.html.

1. Go create a new account at http://www.blogger.com (unless you want me to mess with your real account), check "rememeber me" when you log on.
2. Create a new blog, enter you FTP password if you want me to be able to actually publish changes I make.
3. Add a blog entry that says you want me (Eric Costello) to add an entry to prove I was there.
4. Go to http://www.glish.com/cookies.html.