Flexible Layouts with CSS Positioning

This article was prompted by the growing crop of CSS “tips and tricks” articles that have surfaced in the last year or two. Typical of these are the three column design making use of left and right fixed columns hanging on their margins; and the use of @import, instead of JavaScript, to feed appropriate style sheets to differently enabled browsers. These ideas are very cool and their authors should rightly be heaped with praise, but I can’t help feeling we’ve been here before. Remember when you figured out how to make a table of images display without the gap? Or how about when you worked out the browser’s table rendering algorithm and started using “educator” rows to guarantee correct display? Even more sinful, do you remember discovering those “hidden” (non-standard) attributes like marginwidth? As web designers, we are naturally drawn to tricks, gimmicks, and workarounds. We need to keep our attention on what we are trying to achieve in long run.

Falby, Doug. List Apart, A (2002). Design>Web Design>CSS