[thelist] Re: thelist Digest, Vol 5, Issue 43

Diane Soini dianesoini at earthlink.net
Tue Jul 15 20:50:52 CDT 2003


I'm curious about something and please forgive me if you have already 
talked about this here. I feel really ambivalent about the whole 
philosophy that using div tags for layout is somehow better than using 
table tags. I would love to fall squarely on the side of web standards 
and css and div tags, but I have yet to ever make them work well.

I checked my web stats and I still have a significant number of 
Netscape 3 users, as well as about 15% Netscape users as a whole.

I have yet to find a single css standard that is supported consistently 
across the board. So what is a good web designer supposed to do? It 
would be nice to be able to say "Netscape 3 and 4 users get on with it 
and install a better browser!" but my audience is not technical at all. 
The subject of my web site can even be considered anti-technology! So 
I've been stuck with keeping my html very simple and basic and it kinda 
sucks.

As for div tags, they are nearly worthless if you want to make a layout 
as complex as something you might design in Quark. And isn't the 
argument quite semantic? Why is div somehow more correct than table? 
And don't say "separation of content from presentation" because all you 
are really doing is removing a few lines of presentation code from the 
content. Otherwise the content and code is still together.

I'm rambling now, but I'm conflicted.

> [snip]
>>   Go to this URL: http://www.bluerobot.com/, which offers two =
> different ways
>> to center a <div> with CSS. On the right hand side the menu that 
>> lists =
> 'CSS
>> centering 1' and 'CSS centering 2'.
> [/snip]
>
> Thanks a whole load of bananas, Alexander. Glad we did not give up.
>
> Whoopee, this worked! I used the CSS #2 solution at the Blue Robots 
> site =
> and tweaked til it looked just right. No matter the resolution, there 
> is =
> an equal amount of space left and right on the newer browsers (well, =
> IE5.5 and IE6.2). Actually NN4.7 looks much better when I changed the =
> table width from percentage to fixed-width pixels on the html 
> page...and =
> text-aligned "center" the .bottom class (instead of text-align: left) 
> in =
> its stylesheet.
>
> For IE and N6.2 (and hopefully IE6 and N7.x and others):
>
> stylesheet changes:
>
> div#bot { position: absolute; left: 50%; width: 500px; font-weight: 
> 500; =
> color: #009; font-size: .8em; margin-top: 10px; margin-left: -166px; =
> padding: 10px;}
>
> (Note: I had tried a negative margin solution very similar to this 
> about =
> 3 days ago but left out the crucial left: 50%, so I gave up.)
>
> and
> changed the .bottom class to text-align: center" (was "left").
>
> Best,
> Sharon
>



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