Recently I’ve been trying to better my HTML style. One of the main things I’ve been focusing on is using divs instead of tables. WHRY? Because if you know how to use them, they are much more powerful.
Protip: divs are useless without CSS. So learn that first. If you don’t already know CSS and you’re still designing sites without it… leave website design alone and spend your free time knitting sweaters. And by “knitting” I mean “kicking“… and by “sweaters” I mean “midgets“.
When you’re laying out a site, you can setup a div class for lets say.. um… a logo. Then you can set an absolute position of said div inside the CSS class. What does this do? Well it gives you full control over the position of the image… even positions in negative numbers. Which means you can have images overlapping containers and other cool shit like that. It really helps to make your website look tricked out.
The other cool shit about divs is you can have them act like tables, and yet you don’t need to have them nested all fucked up like tables need to be. Oh and they seem to be more XHTML friendly. Seems like most websites that aim for meeting standards use divs over tables.
Another interesting thing is using CSS to skin standard HTML blocks. You can do anything from defining your own “strong” tag, or completely overriding the standard look of an “hr” tag.
So far the new site design is coming along great. It didn’t turn out to be a complete redesign, but its enough to be a big change and bring back the attitude the community misses.