[leon_nerd]

I have recently started to learn web designing, with special stress on use of CSS to design the pages.

I have been researching a lot on the internet, reading bunch of articles but there are lots of times where I am not quite satisfied with the explanation. The articles on the internet sometimes miss that practical touch. So, I am hereby starting a thread where I will be putting my queries, hoping to get their answers from the experienced people over here. You experience will add a practical and personal touch to the answers and I believe that will be much better compared to ponder over articles that I couldn't understand. I will be updating the list of my queries on regula basis .

So here are my queries:

1.) Till now what I have read about using web standards, I feel that correct web designing is about placing items with respect to the top and left of the page (mostly), instead of creating table cells and putting my content inside them. Am I right?

2.) I fail to understand the use of <div>. I thought <div> creates a small division under which you can put your items. But then someone cautioned that <div> should not be used to create table cells like structures.
(a). What exactly does that mean?
(b). What exactly does <div> do?
(c). How to use <div> to create layout? Or is there some alternate to <div> that I should use?

3.) What does the float property do? I understand that it floats the element...but for what kind of situations we need to float object?

Practical examples in support of the answers will be really appreciated. I am sure there are lots of other newbies who wander around trying to find out questions to similar questions like me.

Thanks a lot for your time.

[pgo]

1) The right way to do things is to use XHTML to structure your content in a logical and semantically meaningful manner and CSS to change the way it looks.

2) A <div> is a non-semantic block element. It's just like a <p> (except that "p" has semantic meaning and browsers don't usually give <div>s a default margin). For the most part, I use <div>s only when I need an element to break apart the content (i.e. for multiple columns).

3) Floating removes an element from the normal top to bottom document flow and "floats" it all the way to the left or right of where it would normally fall. Other elements then wrap around it as needed. Floats are good for placing things side-by-side.

www.htmldog.com is a good place to start.

I'd mark up this post like so:

<ol>
<li>First answer</li>
<li>Second answer</li>
<li>Third answer</li>
</ol>
<p>www.htmldog.com is a good place to start.</p>