Chapter 5. Layout

PRETTY TEXT and fancy images are all well and nice, but in terms of real layout—placing bits of a page exactly where you want them—things are a bit linear so far in this book.

Before CSS 2 became widely supported, the only practical way of laying out a page in anything other than a long single column was with HTML tables, transparent “spacer.gif” images, and lots of non-breaking spaces: nbsp;   ...

Now that CSS 2 is widely supported, you can manipulate the position of every HTML element on a page with style sheets. Not only does this approach dramatically reduce page weight and download time (those multiple nested table elements and spacer images didn’t half fatten things up), CSS layout also leads to more manageable, ...

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