How would I go about this layout

Mister_Pister · 21 Jan 2006 at 09:42

what I basically want is like those sites where they have a small interface directly in the middle of the page - im not sure if this is done through frames/iframes or whatever. Behold the ascii art..

Code:

_____________
|            |
|      ___   |
|     |   |  |
|     |___|  |
|            |
|____________|

Bloo_Fish · 21 Jan 2006 at 10:21

I'm not sure how easy vertical centering is becuase i've never tried to do it, but horizontal is fairly easy, take a look @

http://bluerobot.com/web/css/center1.html

which takes advantage of auto width margins or negative margins

http://bluerobot.com/web/css/center2.html

i personal prefer auto margins.

richard1973 · 27 Jan 2006 at 14:16

its done by using IFrames with table cells. You use tables to create your layout positioning then you can use Iframes within the cells. I use that for my site www.richard1973.co.uk (site is currently down today it seems, i just tried and i'm at work, grr at ntl hosting).

iCraig · 27 Jan 2006 at 14:43

richard1973 said:
its done by using IFrames with table cells. You use tables to create your layout positioning then you can use Iframes within the cells. I use that for my site www.richard1973.co.uk (site is currently down today it seems, i just tried and i'm at work, grr at ntl hosting).

Perhaps that does work, but its possibly the worst way to design a layout.

Tables = bad, iframes = bad, so tables and iframes =...well you can imagine.

A relative positioned DIV will allow you to have a DIV in the centre of a larger DIV with a lot less crap code surrounding it all.

richard1973 · 27 Jan 2006 at 14:52

nothing wrong with tables, they display correct across all browsers and have been in existance since html began (probably). tables and iframes again for me work fine on netscape and IE with positioning, I've never had any problems. Sure tables do produce quite a bit of code once you start nesting them but they are reliable.

I'll have a look into DIV tags though out of curiosity as I've not used them before.

iCraig · 27 Jan 2006 at 15:01

Nothing is wrong with tables for displaying tabular content, not for structuring layouts.

And they may have been in HTML for a long time, and probably will be for a long time to come. They have their place for showing football tables and recipes. Not for designing your entire website in.

Todays web standards revolve around xhtml and css based layouts, for clean accessibility, reliability and flexibility, something that tables simply cannot offer.

Bloo_Fish · 29 Jan 2006 at 18:54

I've just stumbled upon a really good tut for this

check out http://www.456bereastreet.com/lab/centered/both/