Developing with Web Standards

Chapter Nine: CSS-Based Page Layouts

In the early years of CSS, web developers were restricted to using style sheets for superficial styling—fonts, colors, and sometimes margins and padding—but continued to lay out their pages using the tables-and-spacer-GIFs method championed in David Siegel’s famous (or infamous) book, Creating Killer Web Sites (Hayden, 1996).

It wasn’t until well after the release of Internet Explorer 6 in 2002 that Douglas Bowman’s groundbreaking CSS-based redesign of Wired magazine’s website debuted and demonstrated that high-traffic, high-profile sites could successfully use CSS to control page layout. The use of tables for layout has since fallen out of favor; table-based layouts mix presentation and structure, making ...