Even this very simple layout, has lines and lines of code, and a hack!

Position Is Everything have made a name for themselves in tracking CSS support in various browsers, so I trust anything they endorse.

Not on this topic, though. After my first one went out of print in a year, I vowed never again to put so much work into writing about specific technologies. They move too fast. I /would/ like to write a general-interest book on the professional use of blogging. By which I do not mean blogging for a living, which only a few can or should or will ever do, but rather blogging to advance your public agenda as a professional in whatever field you work in.

I made a proposal:

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/12/29.html

But when I talked it over with an agent we agreed that the time is not yet right to reach many people with such a book. And if I ever tackle a project that hard again, I want at least a shot at reaching a lot of people.

Excellent tip, and clearly a popular choice. Thanks!

Yes, I noticed that and was bothered by it too. In this layout you can’t have left column first in the markup, then middle, then right.

One other thing, when messing with CSS, one of the most effective ways to work is to use Firefox’s Dev Toolbar and rapidly tweak the CSS in realtime using the dev toolbar’s “Edit CSS” function. Once you’re happy with the way your page looks, you can copy the rules you modified in “Edit CSS” (which go away when you close “Edit CSS” or navigate off the current page) back into your source CSS.

My team has been happy with the HTML 4 strict DTD, which puts you in standards mode without the super-strictness of XHTML. Just make sure that the line is the very first in the doc:

You can check which mode your doc is in using this trick:
http://www-03.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/BillHiggins?entry=determining_quirks_mode_vs_standards

Quick overview of standards/quirks mode and thorough listing of which DTD puts which browsers in which mode:
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/

I, like you, spent lots of time looking for the canonical 3-column cross-browser layout. Yahoo Grid is easy to understand, and if you use their nifty reset.css you also get a clean plate to start out with — no strange fonts or other hang ups. I’d like to see a CSS 101 book that takes you through all of the Yahoo UI stuff; it would be an ideal way for novices like me to learn the sometimes difficult-to-understand interactions of CSS.

Oh, and I use Firebug as an educational tool. Does IE 7 have such a neat way to identify DOM elements and styles?

The sad thing is that the original HTML, couples with frames and/or tables can accomplish the same results, rendered much faster with less stuff to download, and these primitive tools were designed to be approachable by the average content creator.

This is much the same as lamenting that kids these days don’t know the basics of programming. they’ve been raised to drag and drop templates, tinker with canned settings, fiddle with color schemes, and then get into big big trouble when asked to change something in the underlying logic of the “program”. More than once I’ve heard them say “I can’t make it do that!”

I don’t know the solution. Maybe the inventors of Visual Basic have some ideas.