HTML Forum

BWAHAHAHAHaaaaa.... ::whimper:: They've got to be kidding. Oh, that's ugly... and deprecating "align=" which was the only reliable way I knew of to center anything? The least they could do is wait until a reliable replacement comes along before deprecating something.

I'm finding that most of what you'd normally use tables for can be accomplished with divs, the upper-leftmost of them being absolutely positioned, and the others in the "table area" being relatively positioned to that one. (Just redesigned my essay/blog/rant site with divs & CSS instead of <table>s and <font>s... It seems to function well in NN, IE and Opera, but it DOES use align="center" in some of the div tags...)

Relative positioning among divs seems to default to whatever div comes immediately previous in the actual page code, which leaves a lot of interesting room to experiment with page content optimization positioning vs. page content visual positioning. (could easily cause a WHOPPER of a headache if you tried to get too tricky)

5% left cell, 70% "main" body cell, 5% padding cell, 20% space_for_navigation_cell

but in some include files i might want to still centre stuff without using the bloat of extra HTML.

{text-align:center;}

:) Got that one, but what I was thinking of specifically was a div with a background image, approx 75% of page width, centered. The text is actually left-aligned within the div.

Man, I was reading through the post thinking, oh, I found the answer to that one and sure enough, papabaer was right there.

I've been using that text-align attribute quite a bit and it works quite well. No probs that I can see and I'm testing a wide variety of browsers and on PC and Mac platforms. I'm on the Mac now.

Hello lorax, I've been using the <span> tag to define inline elements and then classes for block elements.

CSS Pointers Group [css.nu]

I also found Opera's CSS support page somewhat helpful...

Opera support for CSS [opera.com]

I have always been a sucker for drop-caps using the span tag and applying a .class to the first letter of an opening paragraph is something I use on occasion. It's simple, it's easy and it is all style (no image involved).

.drpcp1
{
font-weight: bold;
color: #000;
font-size: 26px;
float: left;
background-color : Silver;
padding : 0px 2px;
}

.drpcp2
{
font-weight: bold;
color: #600;
font-size: 26px;
float: left;
background-color: #fc0;
padding : 0px 2px;
}

I'll agree with you on that one! At first I was totally baffled by css and then one day it clicked, and I haven't been the same since!

The <font> tag is going to be the most difficult for people to break away from. But, when they find out what you can do with it in css, they won't ever use that <font> tag again!

<span class="bi80">Content here</span>

sure beats this...

<font color="#808080 "other attributes><b><i>Content here</i></b></font>

If you nest <div id="textblock"> INSIDE <div id="content">, #textblock ends up being a nice little "block" of contrasting background, filled with text, CENTERED on the page, in NN 4.7, IE 5.1 & Opera 5/Mac. Scales perfectly to page width on resize.

...and I'm addicted to HTML tags. I KNOW I should stop, really, but it's soooo hard to do.

...but thanks to a little inspiration from papbaer and tedster, I'm on the track to deprecated tag freedom!! Thanks guys!! -- I probably would have never had the willpower to move towards w3c validation if it wasn't for your inspiration.

...by the way, anybody want to go out for a <font> tag? or a bgcolor=?

</font>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</center>
</div>
</body>
</html>

The conversion is fairly quick once you get the hang of it. Just think, you'll be stripping away 30-50% of your html bloat. That means an increase in text to html ratio which has been discussed recently.

Not that <span> is a taboo - it's totally valid. But you're better off thinking of it as a last resort.

> tedster, hopefully you won't mind this CSS reference for HTML translations to CSS.

Thanks to the information that I've gained here at the forums and my own testing, I'm now a CSSaholic. Oh, I'm nowhere near the level of papabaer (you should sticky him for some URL's!), but I am producing well structured sites and highly optimized html. All four sites have validated for HTML 4.01 Transitional and CSS2. I literally validated just over 100 pages with the W3C a few days ago. Cut and paste, cut and paste, cut and paste, revalidate, revalidate, revalidate...

There's a strange kind of geeky pleasure I get out of testing various CSS setups. I only wish I had more time to hack away - it is kind of addictive, and practical at the same time.

It reminds me of a lost day a few years ago when I did nothing but play with tables until I had them nailed.

I have a paragraph that starts off with a bold headline, a <br> after the bold headline, and then normal paragraph copy. It looks like this...

<p><span class="bi80>Paragraph Header</span><br>
Paragraph content</p>