Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition

Summary

Floating and positioning are very compelling features of CSS. They’re also likely to be an exercise in frustration if you’re careless in how you use them. Element overlapping, stacking order, size, and placement all have to be considered carefully when elements are positioned, and floated elements’ relation to the normal flow must also be taken into account. Creating layouts using floating and positioning can thus take some adjustment, but the rewards are well worth the price.

While it’s true that a great deal of layout can thus be freed from tables, there are still reasons to use tables on the Web, such as presenting stock quotes or sports scores, among other purposes. In the next chapter, we’ll examine how CSS has grown to address the question of table layout.