Remedial CSS

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I've been doing web development for a long time. Long enough to have developed lots of patterns and habits for how I'd approach putting together a website. Because most of my work is done with server side code, I've also yielded most layout thinking to the Panels, Grids, and User Controls I create in ASP.NET.

So it's a bit of a surprise now that I find that my habits are wrong, horrid even when it comes to web development. My effortlessly thinking in tables goes against the grain of any CSS ideologies out there. Having just redesigned my personal site, this is a bit of a drag.

As I read up on layouts with CSS, it's funny to see things turned back on themselves:

• Absolute Positioning - I used to tell everyone to avoid this because of different screen resolutions
• ul/li tags - Which were so passe, and used as an example of the obscure tags one didn't need anymore.
• Tables - frown upon for anything other than displaying tabular data. Read: no layouts, thank you.

So I'm beefing up again. I need to learn the particular advantages of these newer layout strategies - after messing around today a bit I don't seem to gain anything over my older methods. I'm sure this will change.

I did some surfing and checked out various sites... most of them are using DIVs and CSS for layout, not tables. Curiously, Yahoo! Picks is one site that seems to have kept things the way they were.

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