Hi Seth,
You certainly have a basic question, but unfortunately, it is one of the
most difficult questions to answer in terms of your web site. Positioning of
HTML elements in a page is a most difficult problem to solve. Why? Because
your HTML pages will be displayed in a variety of browser software, running
on a variety of Operating Systems, with a variety of screen resolution and
color settings, on a wide variety of hardware configurations. Oh, yes. Let's
not forget that the browser windows will not all be maximized, so the actual
size of the browser window will vary considerably.
As the Internet has evolved, so has HTML. At first, the HTML spec included
inline attributes (e.g. <font SIZE="2">) for setting various properties of
HTML elements. As the Internet evolved, the demand grew for more options
regarding positioning and other HTML properties, and each HTML element's
definition had to be changed with each new version of HTML, in order to
accomodate the new stylings.
At first, tables were used to position HTML elements. A table can be
invisible if you set the borders to 0, and setting the various sizes of the
cells works well to do positioning. In addition, you can use percentages for
table/cell height and width properties, enabling a table to expand or
contract according to the browser window size. However, the drawback to this
is that the elements in the cells of the table are confined to the relative
positions of the table cells themselves. In FrontPage 2003, Layout Tables
perform this functionality.
Eventually, the idea of using extensible "styles" to handle these various
properties was born, and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) was born. No longer
did the HTML spec need to be revised every time a new property for an HTML
element was created. Instead, CSS enabled the layout and positioning of HTML
elements to be defined as a single "style" attribute, which could handle as
many different "attributes" as desired. Or, an external CSS style sheet
could be defined, which allowed the same properties to be shared by many
elsments in many pages, without the need for inline styles and attributes.
One could assign a CSS class to an HTML element, and automatically that
element would have all the design characteristics defined by the CSS class.
CSS is more in the programming realm than design (it is even
object-oriented) with regards to implementation, although it is still firmly
in the design arena as far as functionality. It does, however, require a
level of expertise beyond that of a novice HTML developer. It is worth
studying, though, and eventually you may well want to use it. However, at
this stage, your best bet would be to remove all inline styles, and use
Layout Tables for your pages.
--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
..Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
Big things are made up
of lots of little things.
Seth said:
I am a true beginner, and I have what I hope is a basic question. Why is
is that the formatting on my webpage appears so differently once I place it
on-line. In particular, the text boxes that I've tried to insert are all
over the place. Any help is greatly appreciated.
