Just reading Packt Publishing - Building Websites with Mambo.
Its telling me to create a "tabled" home page to create a template so I can then insert the "engine" php inserts once on the server and add in menus etc.
They do refer to CSS but TBH im a novice to CSS so dont really know what the powers of it are. Is just basic "styles" as I am using it for now and nothing more?
You should never use tables for layout purposes; that's what CSS is for. CSS allows you to specify exactly how an element should be displayed, e.g. its size, margin, padding, positioning, type face, colours, etc. You can create very rich layouts relatively easily with CSS, and with much, much less code than would be required in a table-based layout. Check out http://htmldog.com/ for some good tutorials.
<html><head>
<?php mosShowHead(); ?>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<table width="780" border="1">
<!-- Part 1 -->
<tr>
<!-- Area 1 -->
<td colspan="2" height="89" bgcolor="#F5C228"> </td>
<!-- Area 2 -->
<td width="178" height="120" rowspan="2" bgcolor="#FFCC33">
<?php mosLoadModules ( 'user4' ); ?>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<!-- Area 3 -->
<td colspan="2" height="33" bgcolor="#FFCC33">
<?php mosPathWay(); ?>
</td>
</tr>
<!-- Part 2 -->
<tr>
<!-- Area 4 -->
<td width="197" height="233" bgcolor="#F5EE28" valign="top">
<?php mosLoadModules ( 'left' ); ?>
</td>
<!-- Area 5 -->
<td width="389" height="233" valign="top">
<?php mosMainBody(); ?>
</td>
<!-- Area 6 -->
<td width="178" height="233" bgcolor="#FFFF33" valign="top">
<?php mosLoadModules ( 'right' ); ?>
</td>
</tr>
<!-- Part 3 -->
<tr bgcolor="#FFCC33">
<!-- Area 7 -->
<td colspan="3" height="40">
Personally I prefer clearfix over that 1px height footer IE6 hack he uses.Not sure how old it is, but just flicking over it quickly I cant see any degraded code or bad habbits
A nice example, first hit on google for "header and 2 column css", should show you how to do it and the basics of editing:
http://www.456bereastreet.com/lab/developing_with_web_standards/csslayout/2-col/
Not sure how old it is, but just flicking over it quickly I cant see any degraded code or bad habbits