CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions

Chapter 8. Layout

One of the major benefits of CSS is the ability to control page layout without needing to use presentational markup. However, CSS layout has gained an undeserved reputation for being difficult, particularly among those new to the language. This is partly due to browser inconsistencies, but mostly due to a proliferation of different layout techniques available on the Web. It seems that each CSS author has their own preferred way of creating multicolumn layouts, and new CSS developers will often use a technique without really understanding how it works. This situation has been exacerbated by the rise of so-called CSS frameworks, which aim to make CSS layout easier by creating a strong coupling between markup and presentation—the ...