Tag Archives: layout

CSS – Three Column Layout Agony

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It’s Monday morning. I took a few aspirin for my back pain, but the CSS three column layout thing is still bugging me. So I did a little more reading over at saila.com, on the topic of CSS and HTML standards (eg. Tables vs. CSS) in web designs that actually work in real-world browsers, and pass (x)HTML validation and CSS validation tests. Craig Saila provides some HTML layout templates, CSS examples, and analysis of how they perform with various browsers. Craig also has nice annotated version of his v2 layout with discussion of browser quirks and hacks.

So, after doing a little more reading, my confidence level is up that my design goals will be achievable. And I hope to begin implementing my vvn.net homepage makeover using the new PHP templates I am creating.

Re-tooling my homepage with cool CSS hacks

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This morning, I was looking at some cool multi-column CSS hacks over on glish.com. One of the articles talked about a makeover the author did for Noah Grey. I’ve been reading about the concept of doing a CSS and web-standards makeover since reading how Wired magazine did their makover about 4 years ago… So this is not a new concept for me. I really like the concept of following web standards. Normally I follow web standards for simple layouts… but then I fall back to using tables if some shlocky old browser will not behave… It’s just that everytime I try it, it works great for one or two browsers, and then some other browser really messes up the layout. (Feels like I am confessing my sins.) So over the past few years, I have studied the concepts of cascading style sheets ( CSS1 and CSS2 ) and web standards, and tried to find the perfect layout techniques to do 3-column layout — without tables inside of tables and all that old cruft.

I enjoyed the CSS articles from glish and I really like the new Noah Grey web-site because it is a really clean page layout and I think his music page is interesting (but I have never listened to any of the music, so can’t recommend it.) [Note: J.V. says be careful what you recommend.]
This also led to a couple nice articles and example layouts over at bluerobot.com, and the cool 3 column layout example.

So I’m getting ready to re-tool my vvn.net homepage with some cool new CSS tricks — but I also need to fix some broken RSS feeds and test with some more browsers. I’ll let you know when the major upgrade is complete.