vincevincevince - 3:55 am on Nov 23, 2006 (gmt 0)

I think that there is much to be said for not letting coders get involved with design. The only exception is for SEO, in which case the designers need to be told certain things which don't work from an SEO perspective (non-standard fonts which would need to be images, fancy flash navigation... etc.)

An overall 3 column layout. Within this there is a central flexi-width column that contains a further 3 vertical columns with borders and background images that overlap between columns. The columns must be flexible width and always be in exactly the same 33% ratio. The text must be resizable and the layout must not break within 2 increases of text size. The columns must allow for different amounts of textual content but must always be the same height as each other.

Nested tables comes to mind, with CSS relative positioning for the overlapping backgrounds.

<table><tr>
<td width="100">1st main</td>
<td>
.<table><tr>
..<td width="33%">Ratio1</td>
..<td width="33%">Ratio2</td>
..<td width="33%">Ratio3</td>
.</td></table>
<td width="100">1st main</td>
</tr></table>