March 2004
Intermediate to advanced
528 pages
16h 33m
English
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Chapter 10. Floating and Positioning
Sure, CSS makes content look good with font changes, backgrounds, and all the rest, but what about accomplishing basic layout tasks? Enter floating and positioning. These are the tools by which you can set up columnar layout, overlap one piece of layout with another, and generally accomplish everything that so many tables have been used for over the years.
The idea behind positioning is fairly simple. It allows you to define exactly where element boxes will appear relative to where they would ordinarily be—or relative to a parent element, or another element, or even to the browser window itself. The power of this feature is both obvious and surprising. It shouldn’t shock you to learn that user agents support this element of CSS2 better than many others.
Floating, on the other hand, first came to us in CSS1, based on a capability that had been added by Netscape early in the Web’s life. Floating is not exactly positioning, but it certainly isn’t normal-flow layout either. We’ll see exactly what this means later in the chapter.
Floating
You are almost certainly acquainted with the concept of floated
elements. Ever since Netscape 1, it has been possible to float images
by declaring, for instance,
<img
src="b5.gif" align="right">.
This causes an image to float to the right and allows other content
(such as text) to “flow around” the
image. The name “floating,” in
fact, comes from the document “Extensions to HTML
2.0,” which stated:
The additions ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.