Overall, though, there are no hard-and-fast rules and, despite what some designers might
claim, neither fixed nor liquid design is better than the alternative. You should use whatever
technique is suitable for each project you work on. Later in the chapter, you??™ll see various
methods for creating strict, fixed layout skeletons, liquid designs, and combinations of
the two. Some of these will then be turned into full page designs in Chapter 10.
Layout technology: Tables vs. CSS
Unless you??™re the sort of person who favors very basic web pages, with most elements sitting
underneath each other, you??™ll need to employ some kind of layout technology when
THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO CSS AND HTML WEB DESIGN
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designing your web pages. Historically, web designers tended to use tables for doing this,
combined with invisible GIFs (sometimes called spacers or shims) to stretch table cells to
the required size. In the early 2000s, CSS layouts gained a foothold, and now more and
more designers are moving toward CSS as a means of page layout.
With few exceptions, pretty much everything you can do with a table can be done faster,
better, and with a greater emphasis on accessibility when using CSS. With content and
design separated, it??™s much easier to tweak or rework a website, because you??™re editing an
external document that controls spacing and positioning, rather than messing around with
complex tables. We discuss one of CSS??™s major benefits in this regard, how it encourages
logical element placement, in the next section.
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