News from Sydney: Russ Weakley from Max Design tells about a new tutorial to add to the already excellent and much linked-to Listamatic and Listutorial – the Floatutorial. As the name suggests, it illuminates that black art of CSS web design that makes table-free web pages possible by careful use of {float:right} and {float:left;} combined with some other CSS trickery.
Floats are very difficult to master – you need to understand some of the terminology, and particularly how some of the browsers out there get things right and wrong (and boy can they get it wrong). But once you do get it, you will find that unshackling your web pages from <table> layouts becomes so much easier. What these examples do is take an idea (“Floating a scalable drop capital”) and show you the before and after, along with the various steps in between. It couldn’t be easier.
In addition to the excellent article mentioned above, I’d also highly recommend John Gallant’s article in Digital Web Toward a more standards compliant Internet Explorer. Reading this article provided a real Eureka! moment for me, and should sit nicely with the many examples provided in the floatutorial.
Move over David Blaine – this floating business just got much easier!