How does one determine the correct CSS layout/approach?

CSS takes time to master don't be under the illusion that one picks it overnight, treat it with a lot of respect for it is infinitely powerfull and flexible with countless variations in approaches that may be taken to arrive at the same outcome.

If you are not sure whether a layout should be fluid then go for fixed, unless you understand the subtleties of fluid layouts and exactly how your design would fill fluid space it is best to stick to fix widths untill your understanding is deeper.

Have you fleshed anything out yet? we tend to like to see what has been attempted before we start to offer guidance it also helps to understand the competence level.

Hugo.

I have concrete knowlegdge of the fundamentals of CSS and use it formatting purposes all the time. However, I am a beginner when it comes to page layouts/positioning. As I mentioned, this is my first attempt at creating a pure CSS layout.

I have one of my attempts back at home, sorry about that. Didnt want to post because it was unfinished and I just felt like scrapping it anyway and starting anew....again. lol

There is I'm afraid a world of difference between simple formatting and styling and in using the full range of CSS properties to effect CSS-P, and it will feel at times as though it's a bit of a struggle

It would help to see how your thinking is running with your attempts though at this layout conversion.

Hugo.

I'll try to get my attempt posted once I get home today.

But I was also looking for more of tips on how others go about deciding how to chop up their design into divs and background images, etc. I guess that's the part Im stuck on...the "planning" aspect of it, even before attempting to code it.

Forget about layout. Mark up your content for what it is - headers, paragraphs, lists, etc, and THEN we work on styling.

I've got the separation of style and structure down. I did in fact start out with all of my content.

I do appreciate the the tips guys. I guess there's no one answer on how I should approach converting my design.

You must understand, you've shown us nothing to work with. You said you have the content fully marked up with html; show us that. Show us the css you've attempted and a sketch of what you're trying to achieve, and we can discuss the pros and cons of your attempt pedagogically[1].

//edit: Sorry, I forgot about the table based page. It is obviously the model for layout.

cheers,

gary

[1] Here's another word, Hugo, that can't actually be muttered aloud.

something to do with bicycles isn't it?

There are those, among the great unwashed masses, those denizens of the web, who by their appreciation of an erudite, nay, may we say abstruse, civilized, cultivated, cultured, deep, educated, encyclopædic, learned, lettered, literate, pansophic, profound, scholarly, well-read, wise and perhaps a bit esoteric or arcane vocabulary, stand out as gentlemen and scholars.

:shrug: There are so few of us left.

cheers,

gary

That sounds like a load of bollox to me

Philistines, I say! I am surrounded by Philistines!

gary

Not so Gary.

Your loquaciousness suggests you are an erudite scholar.

And as for padagogy and pedagogically (etc) in my profession you are required to be able to say it (teacher).

I just can't spell well

A load of bollox it may be, but one is minded of the fact that:

Those that have an understanding of the recondite nature of the language that they use to express their thoughts, will, often have a proclivity to embellish those thoughts, and to the casual exoteric reader this may appear to be of a prodigal nature, but it is in fact importunate of that reader to understand the profundity of these words and one would hope that they did not take a pertinacious attitude towards what is written but instead attempt to agglutinate with the writer and hopefully gain some increased knowledge at the deeper expressive ability obtained through an arcane understanding of the language, that is, however, not cabalistic in nature but in truth apprehensible to the multitude.

We must be careful though not to take a dogmatic view of those that choose the obdurate path and dismiss such erudition with reference to anatomical features thus demonstrating a insensible position.

I find your equivocatory obsequiousness to be quite vexatious.

Indeed; I find the approbation of the remarks to be somewhat overly obeisant.

So; what was the OP's question again?

Question? :?

Oh don't tell me we've managed to de-rail yet another thread :rolleyes:

I think we're waiting for him to get a word in edgewise. Either that or for his code.

cheers,

gary

Just sitting here drumming our fingers on the desk, ho hum. OP probably fled in horror though from all this arcane drivel that's been spouted.

Apologies OP! pleasepost your code so that we can assist and cease the rabid ramblings of deranged coders minds

man, 40 trips to answers.com and I still have no idea what you intellects are going on about

I prefer to use dict, a client for the Dictionary Server Protocol (DICT). DICT is a TCP transaction based query/response protocol that provides access to dictionary definitions from a set of natural language dictionary databases.

dict, the client, is, I believe, a default install on many modern OSes. OSX seems to hi-jack the DICT url, using its own dictionary.

I just noticed this: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/302/ This should help the poor legacy (read MSFT) OS users.

cheers,

gary

I haven't a clue what Gary's on about, I think it is just deliberate offilanariance

lo siento, yo no hablo espanol (but I did go to the dictionary again )

Well, both dict and answers failed to tell me what offic offiliat offilanarafo offilanariance is.

bien, entonces la palabra para la noche esta 'pritemptulatious' rapido! a la dictinario por favour

What the f*** are you on about? I know this is an international forum but aren't you taking things a bit too far! Can we return to the obscure long words please - at least I've got some chance of understanding those

Ok !

So I was sitting, having finished one of those frustrating days dealing with IE, staring at the screen , when that screen saver popped into life, and looking into that dark black void I couldn't help but to wonder whether if indeed a stars mass velocity did not fall off with radius in a galaxy as fast as the luminous mass as dictated by Newtonian law. So clearly stars towards the outer edge were rotating far too fast to be balanced by any gravitational forces contained within that luminous mass, thus the case for 'Dark Matter' had to be a very compelling one. With this in mind I further conjectured to myself whether in fact the Supersymmetric model was in fact a fairly likely candidate for an satisfactory representation of the fundamental structure of 'Dark Matter' since neutralinos are fermionic partners of the neutral gauge bosons and the Higgs field They would have high mass, yet interact very weakly, and those two qualities make them a good candidate for dark matter. On the other hand I also couldn't help but then consider the metaphysical conundrum that is the synergetic universe, ho hum.

Sounds like someone has been reading the back of their cereal packet again.

...which becomes even more conundrumified [ good word, eh ] when one ponders the question of how gravity actually works (in real, tangible terms as opposed to the theory that represents science's current best guess) i.e. is it really a 'pulling' force, or perhaps it's a 'pushing' force such as the mythical Tachyon Field, pushing matter towards a void in the Field, such as one might find where mass exists, such as a planet within a universe filled with a reasonably constant/consistant 'pushing' energy. And when one considers the case for and against an energy continuum such as the one that Nikola Tesla called "gravity field energy" when he managed to tap into it to extract energy supposedly from thin air, one has to stop and consider the impact that such a concept would have upon Dark Matter Theory and the synergetic universe as we know it. Ho hum indeed!

Cripes that wasn't covered on the back of my cereal packet, think thats part two I'm going to have to have another bowl to finish the packet off and go buy the next installment.

Gravity and Magnetism the two great mysteries. Magnatism that concept that we all take for granted yet defies many basic known and acepted physical laws, it has no power source ergo it cannot expend energy, it shouldn't happen

Gravity which will be fundemental to our eventual understanding of the fabric of the universe. Is Tesla's 'Gravity field energy' the 'glue' that binds the universe that holds matter to some restraint. Tesla did some somewhat mythical experiments did he not, using super huge versions of his 'Tesla Coils' attempting to warp the fabric of space and time.

As far as theories go I tend to like the Tachyon field one of pushing matter towards a void and have always been in admiration of that renowned physicist Roddenbery who I believe first postulated the theory of Tachyon energy and which was put to the test in practise on many occasion by the legendary explorer and scientist Picard.

Surely not.

What is magnetism? Some small thing runs around in circles real fast. Some other things run around in circles real fast in the other direction. That provides an attraction for lots of other small things.

This effect is exhibited at football grounds around the country every Saturday afternoon. The power source is oranges (quartered).

Ah yes but given that the spectator is the 'observer' in the Hiesenburg principle one cannot be certain that the 'orange' quartered or not is in fact the source as it is not possible to verify the true state of the 'orange' and that it is in a state of constant flux.

damn these cereal packets are just to incomplete

Quantum physics and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle - whatever next!

...maybe the above could help explain why the OP has not returned to reclaim his thread about CSS-P.

The OP is far far away in those hills and still running.

...maybe the above could help explain why the OP has not returned to reclaim his thread about CSS-P.

I guess that in the act of observation of the nature of the poster reclaiming the thread we classically fall into the uncertainty principle and the more we describe the fact the more uncertain we must be that this is the case and as stated in fact a thread or particle may at once occupy co-existent space.

I think that now leads us neatly onto SuperString theory

I just KNEW that String theory was going to be next on the list of things to make a passing reference to in this never ending thread of intellectual jousting and obscure passing references to things that one refers to when one is jousting in an intellectual way with others who make obscure passing references to things that one refers to when one is jousting in an intellectual way with others who make obscure passing references to things that one refers to when one is jousting in an intellectual way with others who make obscure passing references to things that one refers to when one is jousting in an intellectual way with others who make obscure passing references.

...parp!

Now that really had me thinking that we must ask Tony to improve the line spacing on paragraph text, There was me going "blimey can't seem to scan and focus to the next line what's up with me pea sized brain today?"

I think the only conclusion that can be drawn is the universe isn't position:fixed or absolute but relative. Elements are generally floated and complex elements are tend to be floated left more than right. Strings if they do exist, must be unobtrusive and can only exist in the javascript dimension. While some of this may be conjecture, one thing that is certain, tables occur only rarely.

Oh it always has to come back to CSS similes, anyone would think that that was all we knew.

Actually bet you my last dollar that the Universe is in fact non standards and in fact employs a completely rigid deep nested table layout in ever decreasing spirals of cells disappearing into infinity.

That would put us in our place so to speak.

I enjoyed reading your conversation that I almost forgot what I was here for. Oh yes! I'm starting again to get a handle on CSS and started to redo a site I did long ago. I have a basic format and want to simply add some space between the image and the text to the right, http://www.anthonydellcellars.com/new.html

My CSS book is not showing me that simple style that you all know so well. What gives space between the image and text? padding? margin? I get confused.

What to do?

Hahaha, right, coffee break over, back to your desks...

And by the way, I got to 'pedagogically', threw it in to google with the word 'definition' and got the following:

"ped·a·gog·ic(pd-gjk, -gjk) also ped·a·gog·i·cal (-gj-kl, -gj-)
adj.
1. Of, relating to, or characteristic of pedagogy.
2. Characterized by pedantic formality: a haughty, pedagogic manner."

I gave up then!

[pedagog] one who is a schoolmaster.

Often they are also:

[pedants] boringly literal with it, focussing on the minute detail

Your dictionary definition could be said to be rather pedantic in nature

My CSS book is not showing me that simple style that you all know so well. What gives space between the image and text? padding? margin? I get confused.

What to do?

It's a case of what suits the circimstances, there is no right or wrong way, with your layout the way it is you will have to do something like:

#content img {margin-right:1em;}

I would also perhaps decrease the padding on the #container to allow the img and paragraph in #content a little more room to breath but that's only my view and not necessary.

Now to the reasons you are using presentational attributes in your markup? is there one? remove all those attributes you control all presentation through stylesheet properties, classically the image should be floated left and positioned before the paragraph in the markup flow.

P.S why did you not start a new thread?

Hugo.

My CSS book is not showing me that simple style that you all know so well. What gives space between the image and text? padding? margin? I get confused.

What to do?

It's a case of what suits the circimstances, there is no right or wrong way, with your layout the way it is you will have to do something like:

#content img {margin-right:1em;}

I would also perhaps decrease the padding on the #container to allow the img and paragraph in #content a little more room to breath but that's only my view and not necessary.

Now to the reasons you are using presentational attributes in your markup? is there one? remove all those attributes you control all presentation through stylesheet properties, classically the image should be floated left and positioned before the paragraph in the markup flow.

P.S why did you not start a new thread?

Hugo.

I was enjoying your thread that I forgot. I'll start a new thread next time.

What are the presentational attributes in the markup? I copied this basic css/html from another css site. It looked clean to me. How would you do it differently? Also, since I have a hard time grasping CSS, what is the proper way to start a style sheet. Should it have a body style to begin with?

I was enjoying your thread that I forgot. I'll start a new thread next time.

What are the presentational attributes in the markup? I copied this basic css/html from another css site. It looked clean to me. How would you do it differently? Also, since I have a hard time grasping CSS, what is the proper way to start a style sheet. Should it have a body style to begin with?

The presentational attributes were - iirc - align=""
anything that is to do with visual layout should be handled through CSS

Very briefly a stylesheet starts with a html,body rule set and is followed by all the generic site wide default styling i.e heading tag sizes, paragraph size/color, generic anchor styling any rules that are going to be required across the site, then try and describe your actual main structural rules for the layout i,e your wrapper, sidebar, content area, footer etc, then follow that group with the descendent nested elements that will live in the main areas.

There are no hard and fast rules just try and apply a little logic and try and mirror the flow of your css rulesets to as closely match the markup flow so things read from top to bottom as much as possible. Use comments to mark out stylesheet areas, think in terms of someone reading it and needing to quickly be able to identify rulesets to edit.

I was enjoying your thread that I forgot. I'll start a new thread next time.

just re-read it, was one of the more amusing ones!