Using the float property and other advantages of CSS layout

Posted September 6, 2004

A subject that I have been learning about constantly.

Not really understanding until just recently what it meant to separate the content from the markup, it struck me this week. For PDA, cell phones, and other hand held internet access and for verbal readers for the blind, CSS is more accessible to those users.

When those files are being read out loud, the markup specs are all read like a page from a book. It is hard to distinguish the information on
a webpage when it is buried in thousands of useless characters. This is also why in the current XHTML web standard alt tags are required to describe the contained images. This is in anticipation of when CSS is the prevalent development tool and the only markup that is left in a webpage in terms of presentational markup is the image attributes.

On Wednesday, I learned the unexplained way about the default three column layout. By using the float attribute of a div content container. (excuse my jargon, I am still learning the different set of terminology in CSS.) With declarations of left and right, float allows you to use the containing element as the basis for two elements that can float on the same visual line of site relative to the containers specifications.

Although not an absolute rule, Margin is the padding between elements around a surrounding element, and padding is used for space between the content in an element and the elements borders.

The other extremely important aspect of CSS is the DTD and the xlmns attribute of the HTML tag for many reasons one of which is the rending
of the CSS page in Dreamweaver.