Also, most pages have a corresponding footer
element that can provide navigation links once the user gets to the
bottom of the page, and often holds copyright and legal disclaimers
that need to be present on every page. The rest of this chapter
is dedicated to showing you how to work with style sheets to create
layouts with headers, multiple columns, and footers.
BASIC PAGE LAYOUT 139
Introducing Stylib??”the Stylin??™ Library
In the course of creating Web sites, I have found myself writing the
same pieces of code over and over again. Multi-column layouts,
navigation links, and forms are just some of the things I have coded
with XHTML and CSS many, many times. While the underlying
similarities of the components of these sites are often not apparent
because of the differences in colors, fonts, and other visual
attributes, their underlying XHTML markup and the ???mechanics???
of the CSS that organize that markup on the screen change very
little. Recently, to reduce the frequent sense of d??j??-vu, I started to
develop a library that I now call Stylib. This library, a collection of
XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript ?¬? les, not only contains all the elements
I commonly use in my design work, but also has two important
characteristics. First, the components are designed to work together
rather like Lego?® bricks, and secondly, the parts that I might want
to change from one site to the next??”the type sizes and colors, for
example??”are broken out from the code for the underlying layout.
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