Chapter 4. Positioning Elements

spacesinto the markup to achieve the desired layout. With CSS, you can position XHTML elements with great accuracy without adding presentational elements into your markup that pollute the content and make the code difficult to decipher.

do this while keeping your markup lean and clean, and while sharing the styles you write between like elements of your layout, to achieve lightweight and easy-to-read code.

How well you succeed with these techniques depends on how well you understand the box model, the position property, and the display property. The box model describes the positioning controls that exist for every element in your markup. The position property defines the positional relationship between these elements on the page. The display property determines whether elements stack or sit side-by-side, or even display on the page at all. Let's look at each in turn.