Playing with Boxes

Continuing my exploration of CSS, I’ve decided I love building sites with boxes, as opposed to tables. It’s much more logical when it comes to layout. And while yes, the required tweaks for cross-browsing are annoying, they are simple and intuitive once the reasons are understood. It’s all about playing with nesting to get the desired results, really. Of course, there are some issues. It’s nigh impossible to get a 3-column layout, where each column should extend to the length of the other two, and you have no idea which will be the shortest or longest because each column is being populated dynamically. So then you cheat and throw in a table, but it’s a simple, 1-row, 3-column table, whose contents are still being handled by DIVs.

And text. I tell ya. Nothing gives me greater satisfaction than opening up my stylesheet, changing one line and having that affect my whole site. Kids coming up these days, who’ll never have to deal with the <font> tag have no idea the hell they’ve avoided. Next on the horizon? Proportionally-sized text, as opposed to absolutley-sized text to help usability, and ensuring my designs & builds scale appropriately.