Can anyone verify that Dreamweaver CS4 can accurately display complex layouts?

I do semantic and ligher code possible, and my mantra is KISS. Keep it stupid simple.

Like in physics, simple idea always win.

thanks
-Cristian

(note: the hacks in mine are no longer required either – I wrote that back in 2003/2004 when NN6 and IE/Mac were still a support issue ;))

Your perspective, might also be a little skewed. When you say that this uses more divs than a table structure, it doesn’t. You include the canvas div as equivalent of the <table> element.. I would venture that it’s not it’s simply a wrapper div. If you were to have more than one table on the page to gain the non-nested but differing columns/grid look it would be different:

[table class="line"]
[tr class="item" id="item1"]
[td class="sap-content"]content here

and where is a table’s flexibility when it comes to re-ordering the columns (per Layout Gala) or the dragging flexibility the author says he needed

Floats weren’t built for layout anymore than tables were, it’s a hat tip to authors like Eric that at least there’s a choice :)

I do know that I can not afford the time to test my designs on every browser under the sun. Since I’m trying to write code that can dynamically generate CSS and XHTML, I’d be quite interested in your technique if it avoids all the browser dependencies and has sufficient flexibility for what I’m doing.

Peace,

Rob:-]

I understand what you are saying but the few times i have used this i felt a little better knowing i used css and not a table. I have nothing against tables i’ve just went through the everything in a table stage and its not pretty. Even with this extra bit of code no one who i’ve worked with has had any trouble going through the document.

The one layout i did use it for all my content was a strange idea i had when i saw eric meyer slantastic. I used that layout with Eric Sol’s faux absolute positioning. I could then style the elements how i needed them and they would be easy to use in a cms without any overlapping at the footer.

I will admit that this sort of a technique would probably be a godsend if you were building a dynamic layout, wherein the pieces had to be movable by the user. I can see where this technique would make things vastly easier there. And I think Chris made a good point where ~removing~ elements from the page would be easier using this technique than with tables.

However, I don’t agree that this technique is better simply because it doesn’t require as much CSS, or as many CSS-based fixes for IE. CSS files are cached: they’re loaded once by the browser, and then not downloaded again until a new version of the file comes along. That means you download a CSS file once, and you’re good for the rest of the site.

By comparison, you’re stuck downloading every page of a website, regardless of how similar in XHTML they are. As such, if I’m going to have bloated code somewhere, I’d vastly prefer it in the CSS than in the XHTML, if purely for bandwidth reasons.

FAP is best used for multi-column layouts, not for replacing tables. I can’t believe it would increase the size of your HTML by “15%”, as you only need to use it once for the overall layout. That comes to about 150 bytes of data on its own, with the CSS being roughly 500 bytes. Of course one may decide to use the technique all over their pages, but no one should need it that much.

Some people don’t like having “too many” divs in their HTML, but everyone has to throw in a wrapper div here or there. Adding two or so extra wrappers won’t hurt in any significant way.

In my opinion, Divitis is only a problem in cases where headings and lists (etc) are wrapped in divs instead of their respective elements.

When you’re working with a flexible CMS and producing several websites every week with wildly varied layouts, you’ll be grateful when you can avoid changing the HTML and just work from stylesheets.

I’ve tried virtually every type of layout over the years; tables, floats, negative margins, etc, and so far FAP has been the most stable and flexible method I’ve come across.

If you don’t encounter any issues with your current layouts, then simply ignore Faux Absolute Positioning. For those who can’t put up with all the browser quirks, you should give this a try at least.