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CSS layout techniques and the sites that use them.

3 Columns, The Holy Grail of page layouts — The most elegant technique and perhaps the most sought after layout: a 3 column page with a fluid center column. Easy to understand, easy to implement. I first saw this layout at dynamic ribbon device and have since learned that the sweet CSS came from Rob Chandanais of BlueRobot. Owen also made a very nice tutorial using this layout technique.

2 Columns, ALA Style — Famously chronicled by Jeffrey Zeldman in his ALA article A Web Designer’s Journey, this is an extremely easy layout to implement requiring only a simple float:left declaration.

4 Columns, All Fluid — This technique can actually be used to provide as many columns on a page as you like. Drawback #1) it gets difficult quickly if you want to make any of the columns a fixed width. Drawback #2) it relies heavily on percentages, which the various browsers all calculate differently, so you can’t place your columns very precisely. Still, a very useful technique, especially if you don’t want borders and different background colors for your columns.

3 Columns, All Fluid — A much simpler and potentially more useful technique that then 4 column technique above. It uses float:left, suffers from needing percentage widths for each column, and from potential column wrapping when the browser window is narrowed.

Static Width and Centered — 3 columns all with static widths, and contained in a parent DIV which remains centered in the window. One rather serious limitation of this particular technique is that if any of the three content DIVs contains an image or a really long word that is longer than the width of the DIV, it totally breaks the layout. Each browser breaks it differently.

Nested Float — A very simple layout that features a nested, floated menu in the upper right. Easily reversed. A variation of this technique is in use on this very page.