Brennan’s Blog

I did a presentation the other night about modern web technologies which work in browsers like IE6 and Mozilla/Firefox. Everyone seemed to really like the Div layout described so well at A List Apart which is the growing trend among the more skilled web designers. There are of course some issues with the Div layout.

A significant issue is that applications like Dreamweaver, GoLive and Frontpage have been using heavily embedded tables to force the graphical layouts the users of these applications expect it to support. You cannot really blame how this software works since it has only been 4 since most of these CSS features worked in the dominant browsers! But anyway...

For an improvement for layouts with the new standards the W3C has an working draft in progress for CSS3 implementing Multi-column layout. It allows you to take a single Div element full of paragraphs of text and simply define how many columns it should use to break it up. It is not supported in browsers just yet, but it is great to see ideas coming which are coming down the road.

In the meantime, be sure to use other techniques with Div layouts and CSS which does work in current browsers. Here are a few suggestions:

• Glish CSS Techniques
• A List Apart: CSS
• Eric Meyer on CSS