Sent by John Gunther on 13 March 2005 14:02
After years of valiant attempts to fully embrace CSS, endless reading,
and many lost nights, I am still wandering the desert, candle in hand,
searching for a straightforward elegant replacement for the simple
table-based layout of yore. Unless I'm missing something (and I'd be
delighted to find that my problems are just curable stupidity), CSS
simply fails to address one of the most fundamental page styling issues
-- the need to divide a page into physically defined zones and then fill
them with content --in anything but the most obtuse, complex way! Div
rendering is so content dependent that only the most complex stylings
prevent the content from jumping around on the page the moment it gets
too long, too wide, or too complex. Clevatreva's brilliant code
generator (http://www.cornerstonechurches.org.uk/ctindex.php) is a case
in point. It does a wondrous job of generating tons of impenetrable code
to create a workable 3-column layout -- and you have to rerun it for
every trivial change in size or border, making it fairly useless for the
vast majority of us who generate dynamic pages from an extensive
function library. Am I nuts, or has CSS concentrated so closely on
specifying stitching standards that it never realized it's almost
impossible to make a pair of pants? My holy grail is an algorithm I can
implement in PHP that takes a selection of column arguments and
generates a page whose dimensional layout conforms regardless, within
reason, of the content. Constructive responses, even derogatory ones,
from this list's many CSS sages are welcomed.
John Gunther
Bucks vs Bytes Inc
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