Joseph
Now who uses ems for site sizing and what problems are most important?That's the elastic design I was referring to. A column of, say, 36em is fixed to that measurement. No amount of browser resizing is going to change the width of that column. However, changing the text display size via your browser will modify just how big an EM is in terms of pixels, which will in turn change the width of your column.
Therefore, the problems you're going to encounter is if you create a nice, comfortable design using EMs as measurements, be careful you don't end up causing horizontal scrollbars when a user wants a tiny browser window but huge text (36em at IE 6's "Largest" setting equates to 768px according to the Elastic Design article at ALA).
but if I must use boxes..."Boxes" is a design metaphor so try not to get hung up on the concept being a literal "my web pages look like a load of boxes" (although early pure XHTML+CSS designs were very very boxy indeed, not always a good thing). Similarly, do table-based designs look like grids of tabular data?
We've already cited the CSS Zen Garden as a beautiful example of what you can acheive with this approach, and a number of the designs there are very fluid, rounded, organic structures - not a visible "box" in sight.
I would suggest that before you start thinking about redesigns and moving towards this wonderful approach, have a play around and experiment with the sources we've all provided and just get a feel for it. Once you know what you can do, what is within your grasp and confidence/experience level then you can start applying that to your work.
As you say, it does require a change in design thinking, and also a shift in conceptualising how to code your sites, but however daunting it may be it's well worth it.
Enjoy!
MOU
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