Five Simple Steps

CSS3 layout modules

By Rachel Andrew

In the last few years we have seen a great leap forward in what we can achieve with CSS – web fonts, gradients, shadows and media queries are now part of our everyday toolkit.

CSS layout itself, however, has moved on little. Developers have experimented with using display: table and display: inline-block for layout, in order to mitigate the limitations of layouts based on absolute positioning and floats. Yet, these methods seem as much like hacks as those they try to replace, and come with their own problems.

The future of CSS layout looks far brighter. In this little book Rachel covers some of the exciting modules that are part of the CSS3 specification. They promise a future where we can lay out elements to a grid and easily achieve the ambitions of equal height columns or spreading content evenly across a page.