I personally love floating layouts. I’d marry them but I don’t think my fiancé would like that.
“The concept of floats is probably one of the most unintuitive concepts in CSS. Floats are often misunderstood and blamed for floating all the context around it, causing readability and usability problems. However, the reason for these problems isn’t the theory itself, but the way the theory is interpreted - by developers and browsers.
Still, if you take a closer look at the float theory, you’ll find out out that it isn’t that complex as it appears to be. Most related problems are caused by the older versions of (take a guess) Internet Explorer. If you know the bugs, you can control the way information is presented in a more sophisticated, profound way.” Smashing Magazine
The article above really hits the nail on the head about float layouts. People think that float layouts are like tables in a sense, which they are not. They are way more advance then tables (which tables should be taken outback behind the shed and shot).
Another great article by my favorite site A List Apart
““Tables are dead…”
Several designers have taken Jeffrey Zeldman’s lead in posting tutorials that have helped us get over the initial hump of table-less design. The first efforts have focused on creating two or more columns using CSS positioning instead of tables, thus allowing for a (complete) separation of structure from presentation. These broader techniques have been documented and archived at Eric Costello’s glish and Rob Chandanais’ Blue Robot.
Others have chimed in, including Owen Briggs’ Box lesson and Tantek Çelik’s box model hack/workaround, detailed by Eric Costello, and explained by Tantek. Dotfile lists hundreds of sites designed with CSS layout.
“…Long live tables”
While these excellent resources address the larger issue of creating a general layout using only CSS positioning, other practical questions arise as we find ourselves, as designers, faced with a problem that is trivially easy to solve with tables, but not so obvious with CSS. Such a question was posed on the Webdesign-L list with the subject line “Tables are dead … long live tables.””
Like I stated with the Smashing Magazine article above: Tables are dead and float is the way of the law now. Float is easier and more flexible not only for content and design but crossbrowser compatibility.
Digital Web Magazine states with Web 101 that float layouts are here to make life easier.
“As browsers get better and better, creating layouts with CSS becomes easier and easier. A reliable workhorse in CSS layout options is the float property. Floats are not the only choice when it comes to creating layouts, but they are popular because they survive the unpredictability of designing for various screen sizes, resolutions, and browsers as well—or better—than some of the other choices.”
Having a layout that is flexible for screen resolutions, constraint by the user adjusting there browser window of they have another windows open and just overall the amount of browsers we have out now. Just to name a few Safari, Firefox, Camino, Shirra, Chrome, Opera.
By the way this was done all on my iPhone because I’m working on our house we just purchased. Sorry of it’s cluttered and/or linkage incorrect.
