Cascading Style Sheets have been giving me some problems lately because our web designer is encouraging us to use CSS to position web page elements rather than tables. I was given a design that used a lot of heights specified in the style sheet and some absolute and relative positioning. I was really struggling with the heights, trying to control the vertical spacing of web page elements. Eventually I found a better way of managing the vertical spacing by adjusting the padding around the web page elements. If you set the top padding of your element you can create spacing between the element above it without having to mess with absolute positioning and heights.
The position:absolute and height properties weren’t quite variable enough to ensure that the web page would look the same in various browsers. You don’t want to be too specific because then the positioning will only be correct for one browser. I wish our web designer would create some guidelines on how to position elements using style sheets.
Also I don’t like the way this design style breaks the What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) in FrontPage. FrontPage will soon be history but I bet Microsoft Expression will not make it any easier to design using style sheets and XHTML.
