Anura,
I noticed someone made the comment that the preferred floats to absolute
positioning.
I have just created a new design using absolute positioning. It 'seems' to
work across IE, Mozilla, Opera and latest Netscape (I'm trying to forget
about NS4.7).
But what is the consensus amongst my esteemed colleagues here? Am I walking
into a trap? Are there flaws in absolute positioning so terrible that
something will break dreadfully somewhere?
The "traps" are mainly centred what happens to your positioned layout when the text is resized in the browser (either by text-zoom, page-zoom, or even just a minimum font size that is large). The trap here essentially is that an item with a fixed height (like 50px) will eventually be too small to contain it's text.
With a floated layout, you can more easily "stack" blocks down the page which will "clear" each other regardless of how large the text is inside them.
Typically I prefer floated (or a combination of absolute positioned items in relative positioned boxes), because it's a lot easier to reproduce classic layouts which have a footer below all other elements.
If you layout still works when text is zoomed to 200-300% of it's original size in Mozilla/Opera/IE, then you don't really have much to worry about, IMO.
--- Justin French http://indent.com.au
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