I loathe CSS with a passion.
Correction. I loathe the fact that every web browser supports a different, incompatible subset of CSS2. W3C standards were supposed to save us from having to test pages in every single browser under the sun, but we're travelling at high speed in the opposite direction. We can blame Internet Explorer for getting the box model completely wrong, but even the more well-behaved browsers such as Safari and Mozilla don't support the whole standard, and have significant incompatibilities where they do.
CSS is great so long as you stick to a small number of heavily tested recipes. Stick with those and you're fine. Try to do something stupid like, say, build your own layout from first principles, and even if you spend the requisite day testing in multiple browsers and tweaking around the minor bugs, you'll still probably end up completely screwed because you've ended up relying on some property that one of the major browsers just doesn't support. Bastards.
(This post is the result of me banging my head against the fact that the only way to do liquid-layout block elements of variable height side-by-side works wonderfully in Safari, and isn't supported in Mozilla. Any relation it bears to the opinion I hold of CSS at other times is, frankly, purely coincidental.)
Hey, CSS is wonderful! It just requires a different way of thinking. And yes, you are right, the fact that there are such differences between the major browsers sucks. It's not CSS which is to blame though, it's the browsers :-) I don't get what your problem is with Mozilla, it usually works just fine, and I'm pretty sure this problem can be solved.
Sure: what I want to do will work fine in Mozilla as soon as either one of the following two bugs are fixed, and everybody upgrades (which should be six months to a year after the bugs are fixed).
Bugzilla: "display: inline-table not supported" http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18217
Bugzilla: "implement inline-block in layout" http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9458
Maybe there are other ways to get the same visual effect without relying on advanced CSS?
Are you just trying to achieve:
First bit
First bit
First bit
First bit
First bit
Next bit
That last one was me by the way... Though your thingy lies. My html didn't get escaped. Sigh.
<div style="float: left; width: 40%">
First column
First column
First column
First column
</div>
<div style="float: left; width: 50%">
Second column
</div>
<div style="clear: both;">
</div>
Yes, I should change that to read "stripped", not "escaped".
And no, that's not what I need. That forces me to set how many divs there are in each row, rather than having them arrange for best-fit based on the size of the browser.
If I wanted to do it that way, I may as well just use a table.
Maybe this is what you need?
http://www.saragossa.net/linux-tips/css-4-boxes.html
well i thought i was crazy for litterally pulling my hair out yesterday cuz i was working on a re-design site. so today i decided to do a google search for CSS SUCKS! cuz i was real angry!
i can only design how i was taught. once i feel i know CSS so well that i can just code away, then thats great, but right now it comes down to this:
either give my client the site they have asked for (and paid me money for )
or make web standard people happy (who are not paying me shit, instead they are just adding more rules and depricating tags left and right)
in the end, the site looks the same to the client regardless of web standards, and i will upgrade their sites to w3c standards for no charge once i am FULLY comfortable with CSS.
thank you for letting me vent here, even though it is a bit hypocritical to talk shit about CSS on a website that i can do a "w3c CSS validation check" , No error or warning found
Congratulations!
Valid CSS! This document validates as CSS!