February 03, 2006

Negative Margins On ALA - 2

Having taken the night to hash over in my head the "holy grail" ALA article I've decided I missed or understated the key point of the article.

It's minimalist markup.

The ALA article layout is doing a 3-column, source-ordered layout with 3 less DIV containers than skidoo too. Now at least 1, but really 2 of those DIVs are there for visual purposes only (adding in a border, padding, etc...) but the fact remains it is heavier on extra markup.

I've toyed with minimai markup before and think I might have to take another go at it.

One thing I run into is trying to (ab)use the body element by having it play the role of page wrapper doesn't really work. IE5 and earlier put the scroll bars for the page on the INSIDE of any borders added to the body element. This means a 200px right border on the body element puts the vertical scrollbar 200 pixels from the right edge of the screen. Now I can see some interesting, experimental uses for doing something like that, but for the layout strucutre I want that simply won't do.

So I'll need to toy around a bit. I'll post anything I put together.

Posted by Ruthsarian at 04:32 PM | Comments (1)

Comments

Bravo! I've used skidoo too for about two years on several iterations of a charity website. Sadly the charity is closing and the site has been taken down, else I would have provided a link. The site was stable, cross-browser compatible. The layout is almost infinitely variable and I take every opportunity to point people who are struggling to produce similar layouts to your site. Having heard about the "Holy Grail" ad nauseam over the past few days, I thought I'd better take a look. Imagine my consternation. What's new about negative-margins? Why all that fuss to produce equal height columns? What about borders? I plodded through the comments - oh dear :( Frankly, I'll stick with skidoo too, if that's OK by you, that is until or unless you come up with something akin that actually works. For me this site has always been the Holy Grail. Thank you for your selfless work. Posted by: Lorraine at February 6, 2006 10:39 AM

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