Adding Headers and Footers with DIV-Based CSS Tables
(Page 1 of 4 )
Welcome to the concluding article of a four-part series on creating DIV-based CSS tables. In previous parts, you learned how to construct some basic web page layouts made up of two and three columns with the help of CSS tables. In this article, you will learn how to add header and footer sections to these layouts.
Introduction
Nowadays, many web designers who frequently need to create table-less web page layouts use a few floating divs to accommodate the main columns of the pertinent web document, or utilize negative margins.
Of course, these two CSS approaches are completely valid, and certainly offer a good level of control over the positioning of web page elements. At the same time, however, these techniques require a deeper background in CSS, as well as dealing with certain browser incompatibilities, particularly when it comes to rendering floated divs.
However, with the release of the beta version of Internet Explorer 8, hopefully things will change for the better, since it supports the use of CSS tables -- finally joining other browsers, like Firefox and Safari, which have supported them for quite some time. Put in a simple way, CSS tables permit users to work with divs as if they were common cells and rows of an HTML table, in this way making it easier to create div-based web page layouts.
In the last article of this series, I left off explaining how to improve the visual presentation of a basic web document whose primary columns were laid out by using CSS tables. Naturally, as I said before, this concrete example won’t work with Internet Explorer 7 and below, but it should give you a clear idea of how to implement CSS tables in a simple fashion.
Now that you hopefully recalled the group of topics that were covered in the previous chapter, it’s time to talk about the ones that I plan to discuss in this final article of the series. Since you already learned how to construct some basic layouts composed of two and three columns by utilizing CSS tables, in the next few lines you’ll see how to incorporate header and footer sections into these web page designs, in this manner completing this introductory coverage of CSS tables.
Are you ready to tackle this last episode of the series? Let’s jump in now!
Next: Adding header and footer sections to a two-column web page layout: a traditional CSS approach >>
More Style Sheets Articles
More By Alejandro Gervasio
