The ccsshover.htc ?¬? le is included in
the Stylin??™ download folder for this
chapter, and also in the JavaScript
folder in the Stylib CSS library folder.
This page intentionally left blank
CHAP T E R 5
Basic Page Layout
135 STYLIN??™ WITH CSS
AT THE END OF CHAPTER 3, we styled a page of text in
a single, long column. While you may lay out a simple onecolumn
page like this once in while, usually you want to have
more than one column in order to make the most of the horizontal
space and offer users plenty to look at and interact
with before they have to scroll.
If you dig down under the hood of most site designs, they
are based on two- or three-column layouts, even though that
fact is sometimes visually well disguised. In this chapter, I am
going to introduce you to ways in which these layouts are created
using XHTML and CSS. You can think of any page layout
I show in this chapter as being like the chassis of a car??”it??™s
not visible to the user, but it??™s the underlying framework on
which the shiny bodywork of a great site design is built. In
subsequent chapters, we will see how to add the visual design
into a layout??™s framework, but ?¬? rst we are going to look at the
workings of these underlying page layouts.
STYLIN??™ WITH CSS - CHAPTER 5 136
Some of the layouts we will look at are simple arrangements of ?¬? xed
width columns, while others offer sophisticated features, such as
???constrained liquidness??? (my term), where the layout can automatically
expand its width to best ?¬? t any browser window, but only over
a speci?¬? ed range.
Pages:
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178