Thanks for the write up! I think I am slowly grasping the answers to some of the niggling little problems I often run into.

Thanks again.

In a nut shell, are you saying I can abandon the floats if I make my main centered div relative position I can use absolute position for the child divs?

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As for relative vs. absolute, the relative wrapper is nice for when you don’t want to have to worry about possibly adding additional preliminary content (like a note or another menu bar) later on. You can just add it and rest assured that your old content will render below it, without having to bust out your pocket calculator again.

Nevertheless, Doug, your story explains a principle I have not thought about before.

See what I mean here vs. here (the second uses two absolutely positioned columns).

There may be a non-JavaScript workaround, but I haven’t found it.

I’ve used this trick on my site. Take a look.

however, this information was very useful :D

Oh yea, what is that tiny font called again?

Yes, it is. The top/bottom and left/right values are just box offsets. They can either take length measurements (as you’re probably thinking), percentages, but can also be auto, which is their default value.

An element may be assigned to any of the position values without using any box offsets at all (leaving them as auto).

Many times, divs are placed into the markup purely for the sake of control over presentation. This is usually considered a “bad” thing. But with the current state of browser support for CSS, I still see it as a requirement in some cases. If CSS2 selectors were widely supported in all modern browsers, we’d be able to ditch many of the style hooks we currently find the need to leave in the markup.

If I see no other way to make a layout work without using a generic container div, I at least like to give it meaning by identifying it as somthing — in Stopdesign’s case the column wrapper is identified as: id="content", which could be used to scrape content or as an anchor position for skip link.

True, floats can often produce similar results. I find the use of floats or absolute positioning depends on the design and the effects the designer wants to achieve. I started out using floats when I redesigned Stopdesign last year. It was actually the main content column which was floated, the right-side navigation left unfloated, for benefit of order of content. However, I found that for the details I was going for on Stopdesign, absolute positioning produced the results more accurately and more reliably.

Floats are used extensively for columns throughout the Adaptive Path design. But to gain control over widths, content order, and reliability, I actually use two separate containers which are wrapped around the columns. Someday, I plan to write up a description of how the column layouts work in the AP design, and how the team can dynamically change layouts by simply changing the body class.