Chapter 10. Floating and Positioning
Sure, CSS makes content look good with font changes, backgrounds, and
all the rest, but what about accomplishing basic layout tasks? Enter
floating and positioning.
These are the tools by which you can set up columnar layout, overlap
one piece of layout with another, and generally accomplish everything
that so many tables have been used for over the years.
The idea behind
positioning is fairly simple. It allows you to define exactly where
element boxes will appear relative to where they would ordinarily
be—or relative to a parent element, or another element, or even
to the browser window itself. The power of this feature is both
obvious and surprising. It shouldn't shock you to
learn that user agents support this element of CSS2 better than many
others.
Floating, on the other hand, first came to
us in CSS1, based on a capability that had been added by Netscape
early in the Web's life. Floating is not exactly
positioning, but it certainly isn't normal-flow
layout either. We'll see exactly what this means
later in the chapter.
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