swa66 - 2:35 am on Feb 29, 2008 (gmt 0)

Personally I think CSS needs a huge step back to understand it fully for those deep into slicig, tables (ab)used for layout etc.

One of the steps is back to the original intention of HTML.
Get back to just title, text etc. tags that say waht they contain. Sure you get more of them but the content is back to being just content.
Next take all the layout and move it to the CSS.

As for the paradigm you use as a layout, try not to think of a page divided in cells that make up a table. Think outside of the box (instead of inside).

You can basically grab content and put it where you like.
You can take content out of the flow.
You can float items and the text will wrap around it without you doing much effort or even knowing the font size.

Don't think of CSS as somethign you apply on div's and spans.

So try a few things, try to position items on a page, try a few floats. And now think of layout as something where you can drop stuff on the page, and then let the main text flow in between it all. Style a h1 tp be as high as the background banner, position the text over the banner determine it's hight to have the menu fit in nicely underneath.

Cover the <ul> collection of links into a sliding doors menu that'll look more stunning than anything you made before.

Live will be cool till you run into that browser ... then learn about conditional comments and i's plethora of bugs that don't get fixed (they're features now).

As soon as you draw a grid to place things on, a 3 col layout or so, -in my experience- you lost more than half of what CSS could do for you.