[thelist] Advanced Table Design using only Divs and CSS.

Seth Thomas Rasmussen seth at sethrasmussen.com
Mon Aug 9 16:06:15 CDT 2004


<snip>
Hi Robert,

I'm not sure if you saw in the related posts a couple people mentioned that
designing with CSS is a somewhat different mindset from designing within
the row and column confines of tables.

Your explanation confused me. Granted I didn't read it very thoroughly, but
it's true what they say about pictures and thousands of words. I bet if you
post a screenshot of your desired layout you'll have more luck of someone
suggesting a viable CSS solution for you.

regards.
-marc
</snip>


I have found a couple things helped define the shift in mindset for me. One
was the notion of "rules-based design" as opposed to "grid-based design."
The grid format is akin to the old method of laying out a site with tables.
The correlation should be obvious. The rules-based mindset differs in that
you are rejecting the notion of an inherent grid that's built in to the site
layout. Rather, you are looking at it from a *structural* point of view.
This leads into my second thing which is to stop looking at things in terms
of rows and columns and think of things as structural components. "This
block of text and these graphics and background tiles compose the #content
section. The title along with this fancy graphic are the #banner or primary
heading." Then you start to think more about the freedom of positioning
schemes using CSS and also you start to become more aware of the document
flow. Rather than relying constantly on containing things with grids and
boxes, you can start to code your CSS intelligently to let the inherent
nature of the cascade and document flow do some of the work for you.


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