Posted by Andy Dingley on 01/15/06 11:38

On Tue, 17 Jan 2006 09:36:38 GMT, Spartanicus <invalid@invalid.invalid>
wrote:

>>Are you saying you don't approve of a layout with, for example with 2
>><div>s where one is floated to put it along side the other?
>
>It's a nasty hack, drawbacks:
>
>a) It was never intended to be used as such, consequently usage other
>than it's intended usage is fraught with issues that many authors
>struggle with.

Why do you claim it was never intended as such ?

I can think of three ways to position <div>s alongside each other in
CSS: float, using tables, or absolute positioning.

Now it seems reasonable to assume that CSS _is_ intended to allow two
<div>s to be used as columns (simple separate columns, not
newspaper-flowed columns). If this is the case, then of those three
methods then float is the obvious way to do it.

What evidence do you have that CSS either wasn't intended to support
columns, wasn't intended to use float to do this, or has some other way
to do it ?

I agree that CSS floats have been hard to use and their implementations
have been less than perfect. This is largely a documentation issue
though, not the design of float itself. The brainjar.com article solves
may of these - shame it wasn't around with the initial spec.

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