How embarrassing!

Its about the HTML layout technique used in the book - i.e. DIV's instead of Tables. I am trying to adapt it to my own layout.

Its a fairly standard layout - page centered in browser window; header section, main section with column on right hand side; footer section.

The problem comes when I want both or either of the main section or right hand column to expand downwards (and push the footer section down) as large amount of text is put in either section.

I seem to be able to get one or the other to expand as expected, but not both. The one that doesn't work seems to let the text overflow over the footer and the footer doesn't move.

This would be easy to implement with tables. Can you do it with divs?

I am alone in using divs or are the majority of us using tables and
forfeiting the speed and screen reader benefits?

Don't feel embarrassed, yes working table-less designs is more professional and elegant but is not applicable to all situations. Getting into the learning of working it takes some time and practice so if you have rush with your project better go ahead and implement it as you can even using tables or modifying slightly the one included within the sample. Using DIVs will require same skills and time since can be taken into the table-less way of working. Even so here is a nice link and author that I used in the past to get into it.

http://www.themaninblue.com/experime...m/columnar.htm
http://www.themaninblue.com

Good luck.

I respect that he is trying to show people that using divs can be more flexible for dynamic layouts than using tables, but from my experience using strictly divs and css for the layout just doesn't ever work like expected.

I got the example in the book to work, but upon trying to make some pages of my own that were a bit more complex, I couldn't get div/css to do what I needed it to do, such as having anything docked on the right side of the page, maintaining proper layering, layout, and overflow on stretching pages, and/or not having to use absolute positioning everywhere to get the look I wanted, which gets destroyed with window maximizing/minimizing.

Personally, I ditched the idea for anything other than the book examples. It's opened my eyes to a new way of doing layouts, and once I get to the end of the book to see what neat things he does with it, I'll probably go find a book of css layouts to learn how it's done properly, but until then, I'm sticking with tables.

No. You're not alone. If you look at the final master template you'll find a script that makes adjustments to the DIVs to account for the overflow.

To be honest, I decided to stick with tables. It took about 10 minutes to complete my layout that way. I guess I'll have to live with the slight difference in speed and css flexibility. At least now I can move on to the next chapter!

Besides, switching themes/css even with tables does allow for quite a bit of graphical changes doesn't it?

The 'div method' was just too complex once you'd added all sorts of fixes. I'd be concerned about doing future tweaks to the design layout.

JJ