If CSS didn’t have a plan for letting designers build grid layouts, then it was flawed. Visual design without grids is like programming without variables. I think this is the root of Andrei–and others’–frustration with the eccentricity of float/clear. Fonts and color and letter-spacing are great, and necessary, but grids are the foundation for everything.

I’m not sure I see the answer in this post or in any comment: if not tables or float/clear, then what combination of HTML and CSS was intended to provide designers with the power to create grid layouts?

~Grauw

clear your divs if they’re nested in a containing div

always follow the notion “plan you’re route before you walk your path”

HAI! *bows*

Proving the point, for almost 10 years designers were using table tricks and bugs for layout purposes that weren’t originally meant for a table to be used that way.

A chance that I’m missing something here, but what is it that people are after?

Well… check out my multi-column on Deisng by Fire. That’s kind of thing is a basic layout technique — a three column layout where the third column is then split into two itself. Things like that are what I’m after.

Outside of my personal use of CSS for my pubishing content, Douglas is spot on when he says web applications need these sort of complex layout solutions for UI pieces, as web apps are not just about reading content.

If you want to do a sidebar (like the one on the right here) without specifying a fixed width with the new CSS3 properties, you should use the float and float-displace properties.

For a sidebar on the right as in this page, set float to right on the sidebar element, and float-displace to block on the content element. This way, the content will remain indented past the end of the float rather than wrapping back to the margin. This property should make it a lot easier to implement a number of layouts such that they scale properly with different font sizes.

Ah, I like that.

Seriously though, I feel like I can create a floating monster in my sleep at this point: to blow my own horn, check out the insane floating action of McKinsey Quarterly which has CSS that is so complicated that i am frankly embarrassed by it (though the design is not mine.) . (And it won’t validate either.)

Yes, we are misusing floats, but we can use them to create some serious layouts. HTML == hacking from day one. One day we may have a perfect set of layout tools for the web that completely separate content from presentation and give us the flexibility we need and want, but in the meantime, we just have to get on with it.

Perhaps even with the addition of being able to specify a distance from specified point (20px left of top-right of div-b), or percentages ((40% of width of div-a) below top-right of div-b).

The day we’re given this kind of flexibility would be a really fine day.

Mike P: in an application (a web app) there is more to the UI than reading content.

“Without some reasonable solution to solve complex multi-column layouts, everything looks like a blog”

A chance that I’m missing something here, but what is it that people are after? What are these applications/sites etc. that need ‘complex multi columns?’. Where are people supposed to be viewing these creations? Panoramic monitors?

It’s not that everything looks like a blog; it’s that a multi-column layout works for the data we are trying to present, for the medium that we are presenting it on. This is similar to displaying data in a table; it always looks like a table, because a table is the best way to present said data.