CSS formatting in various browsers

Submitted by Leigh on Wed, 2008-01-02 17:42.

Member's Forum

Hey all.

I'm pretty new to web design and was hoping I could get some advice regarding CSS and tables.

I read that coding entirely in CSS without the use of tables is the preferred method for creating sites, however I've also read that some browsers are not up to date with CSS and therefore they might mess up the formatting if tables aren't used. Has anyone come across this? How might you justify not using tables for formatting to your client if this is a risk?

My second question is, I'm pretty certain, extremely basic. If I design a web page in Illustrator then how do I make active links? Do I use CSS formatting to align the actual link overtop the image?

Thank you very much for any advice you can give -- I feel extremely lucky to have found this community!

Leigh.

CSS

Submitted by natobasso on Wed, 2008-01-02 17:50.

Some use all CSS, but I find sometimes you actually need tables for tabular data within the CSS layout; CSS just isn't practical for this use sometimes.

Test your designs in IE 6, 7 and Firefox. You'll cover most issues your website will have. Then go to w3schools.com to test your html and css for validity. Older browsers, IE 5 and below, I think, aren't nearly as well equipped to handle css, but most folks don't use those anymore anyway.

Design your page in illustrator or photoshop and use the 'slice' tool to create 'slices' which are basically the graphics for your site. Then use CSS to arrange them into containers. You handle text links as you test the page and write html code. You can put them into your slice page for position only but remove them when you make your slices.

Image links can be combined with text, but there's not much reason to do so. You can just as easily surround a text link with a border and a colored (or not) background and let the hover state give it 'movement' so to speak.

More on building CSS properties here:
HTML Dog

More on designing in CSS in Dreamweaver (but I recommend hand coding over Dreamweaver):
CSS in Dreamweaver

----
Powerpoint is not a design application
My latest web design work