
423
F
or many years, page designers have taken for granted the capabil-
ity to place text and graphics anywhere on a printed page—even
enabling graphics, type, and other elements to bleed off a page. This
flexibility in design has eluded Web designers until recently. Lack of abso-
lute control over layout has been a high price to pay for the universality of
HTML, which makes any Web page viewable by any system, regardless of
the computer or the screen resolution.
Now, however, the integration of absolutely positioned elements (AP ele-
ments) within the Cascading Style Sheets specification has brought both
relative and absolute positioning to the Web. Page designers with a yen for
more control welcome the precision offered with Cascading Style Sheets-
Positioning (CSS-P). CSS-P styles are typically applied to
<div> tags, which
are used to separate a page into different areas or divisions.
Dreamweaver’s implementation of
<div> tags and AP elements turns the
promise of CSS-P into an intuitive, designer-friendly, layout-compatible
reality. AP elements offer more than pixel-perfect positioning. You can stack
one AP element on another, hide some AP elements while showing others,
move an AP element across the screen, and even move several AP elements
around the screen simultaneously. AP elements add an entirely new dimen-
sion to the Web designer’s palette. Dreamweaver enables you to create page ...