jcburns's Journal: A CSS layout epiphany!

Well, I got inspired by Dave Shea's Zen Garden pages sufficiently to sit down with GoLive and see what could be done to yank my site out of the morass of tables and cumbersome type tags so I too could breathe the fresh air of Cascading Style Sheet Layout.

Well, this is easier beheld than done.

I could see what was happening there between all the div tags and the css, but getting my own stuff into those containers was, to say the least, just not happening in GoLive 6...I kept getting things not updating correctly and GoLive's 'helpful' formatting that seemed to try and turn all my objects into 'floating boxes.'

I didn't want floating boxes...I wanted the semantic web, so I switched to a workflow of messing in BBEdit (amazingly, it still doesn't suck) and watching the pages in Safari, which was both satisfying and, I'm sure, somewhat less than realistic.

But boy, once you have one clean page to work with, the satisfaction that comes from tiny css tweaks (and knowing that what you've changed is affecting every page referenced) is huge, and, well, It barely feels like I was up until three am last night dinking around with it.

I proudly showed the results this morning (over the phone) to my brother, who then grumbled about the tables on his site.

This CSS Layout stuff is contagious.