Clean CSS Layout

When someone is finally ready to give up the tables and look at CSS for layout, it can be pretty confusing. It is a completely different mentality.

If you stick with it, you will get it. Floats are often proclaimed by fanatics as being the 'right' way to do your layout. Floats are meant to push something like an image off to one side or the other and have your text wrap around it. So, technically, floats are being abused to force page layouts. But, after looking at all the options, floating is the best one you have.

Some of the future CSS capability will finally have a way to replicate the control of a table. But, I honestly would not touch that until all the browsers (including the infamous IE) actually supports this feature correctly. You could also do a fixed size for your layouts, but really.... that is just settling. The fluid layout approach is going to be the best. The website needs to have some flexibility to it to account for the different monitor resolutions (and even screen readers).

Other people can make that argument much better than me. So, I'm just giving what know with my own bias mixed in. You do see a lot of fixed size layouts. Even some fluid ones make an assumption of 960 in size. But, believe it or not, there are people still out there using 800x600. I've seen it.

When reading around, you might very easily come to think that positioning is what you want to use to position things.... HA HA HA... (That was one of those bellowing laughs!)

Remember how I was saying that CSS positioning is a completely different mentality? That stuff is a little messy. Absolute positioning pushes something to the top, left, bottom or right of the next positioned container with an offset. The relative positions pushes the box from where it would normally be to the offset your give it. Static is the default. Fixed glues something to a spot in the window. (Also, if you don't specify something like a height, and think that content will give it height, it will overlap and things just won't work correctly.) You might want to avoid this stuff for awhile. This is not a thorough explanation, but it does show you that it is not quite the cleanest thing to use.

So, for now, floating is the way to go. It doesn't have to been too hard. Here is a great reference that shows how practical and simple using the floats can be. I recommend using this reference as it is the best I could find:
http://www.tjkdesign.com/articles/one_html_markup_many_css_layouts.asp

For more info:
http://websitetips.com/css/tutorials/layouts/

Tikka Masala

If you need some 'wake-up' on your taste buds, I have a recommendation for you!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tikka_masala

Every now and then, you get a little tired of the same old mainstream stuff. Try a little something different! You don't have to spend that much to try it out, either. If you just want to see if you like it, you can find it in the frozen entree section. It might be just enough to know you don't want it again. Or, it could be just enough to get you craving a new taste!

Chicken Tikka Masala is a dish that has a lot of spicy flavor to it. It is not at all like the jalapeno kind of heat. It is more of a mild interpenetrating heat that packs so much flavor.

More to a Person

There is more to a person that what they do.

We like to simplify 'who we are' by summing up our lives with a few simple things. But, can you really say 'I am a ____', when it is just something that you do? Could that really be considered the truth?

What am I getting at, here?

Since there really are multiple levels to a person, the digital expression of a person should reflect that. The web will continue to evolve until it more closely matches the expression of who/what we really are. Now, it is up to us to grab the reins and make use of the opportunity.

So, I'm going to test an idea of where I blog about anything that is actually important to me at the time. Let's see how this goes...