Three column layouts - totally confused

[Digmen1]

Hi Guys

I am working on my website trying to modernise it, and turn it into a nice tidy three column layout.
But I am totally confused as to which is the best or preferred or current best practice method.
Three fixed columns, or two fixed and one floating, or all three floating. ?

Any comments ?

[Baruch Menachem]

I am not the one to ask, but my best results have been with fixed percents. floats on columns aren't rendered consistently from browser to browser, and what looks great in FF and Safari looks embarrassing on IE. I have weird results like text that has lonely words way off from their paragraphs because the float went the wrong way.

[swa66]

I don't think any is intrinsic better than the other.

Some things are just plain hard to stretch forever (graphical banner e.g.)

What I do believe however is that it's best to use some min and max width if you make the width fluid.
There's little point in having very long lines of small text, it's nearly impossible to read.

[SuzyUK]

I personally am a fan of all floating, because until we get a proper layout method [webmasterworld.com] I find floats to be more flexible than anything. I don't have a problem with making them work x-browser, but I realise that it can take a while to find a template you're comfortable with.

Also agree with Swa on the "too wide" to read comfortably part of the fluid layout scenario. More recent talk is now that with the "all zoom" capability of todays browsers (layout, images and text) that fixed widths and font sizes are the way to stay, i.e. as long as the layout is comfortable to read at your preferred settings anyone else can simply use their browser zoom to increase or decrease as per their preference, without us having to allow for every eventuality.

re: a template,
there some good ones out there and a lot are now based on the FNE (float nearly everything) method. I still to this day use my own "Flexi Floats" (search this site or google for it) one, built way back when support for IE5.5/NN6 etc was still required, it still works well for me - it is source ordered (content first) too and can have many columns as needed in either fixed or fluid widths or a mixture.