Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
Back in the dark ages of the last millennium designers had little choice but to use presentational html when they wanted to format text on the page. Even worse in some cases they had to resort to trickery with images and tables to set columns and create 'white space'. We all did it!
This goes entirely against the grain of W3C recommendations to avoid mixing structural html and presentational html. On top of this, as mentioned elsewhere on this site, the resultant tangle of tables, image workarounds and other trickery makes sites extremely difficult for some users to access including those search engine spiders!
With the advent of increased support for Cascading Style Sheets in modern browsers those cumbersome table layouts should soon be relegated to history.
This entire site is laid out using CSS positioning - no tables. Take a look at the source code of this page and you'll see it consists of <div> elements to divide the content sections. Simple structure and easy to see what's going on. You may also have noticed that there is no reference to background images in the code -again all handled by CSS.
Over time I will add some basic step by step guides to using CSS on your web sites.
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