Web How-To: Create Liquid Layouts that Never Fail

---

In Web-page design, page layouts with columns that expand and contract have certain advantages. They also have certain weaknesses if you don’t set them up properly. A flexible, fluid layout should meet the following criteria:

• Readable by a wide variety of browsers and untraditional devices.
• Friendly to search engines.
• Easy to maintain.

It’s possible to create liquid layouts using tables. But to best satisfy the above criteria, you need CSS.

 
After you’ve finished this article, you’ll be able to design CSS-based fluid Web sites with less code, a more easily maintained codebase, and a flexibility that will help the sites adapt to as many environments as possible.
We’ve posted this excerpt as a PDF file. To open the PDF file in your Web browser, click “Bulletproof.” You can also download the PDF to your machine for later viewing.
To open the PDF, you’ll need a full version of Adobe Acrobat (5 or higher) or the Adobe Reader, which you can download here:
.
To learn how to configure your browser for viewing PDF files, see the Adobe Reader tech support page.

---

Excerpted from Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS by Dan Cederholm. Copyright © 2006. Used with the permission of Pearson Education, Inc. and New Riders.