In Evolution of a Home Page Andy King threw down the gauntlet, challenging readers to duplicate WebRef's tabled (and fabled) home page in CSS. Kwon Ekstrom came up with a solution, that worked in a number of browsers. After investigating his solution, I found a few problems with his design, and thought I'd try and improve on it. Andy, Kwon, and I went back and forth over a number of months tweaking and improving my design. What follows is a step-by-step account of my attempt to duplicate WebRef's table-like layout using CSS, while avoiding some of the bugs and problems found in other implementations.

The ultimate goal is to create a CSS layout that exactly resembles the WebReference.com layout made with tables and also behaves well with small window sizes and large fonts.

The target browsers are all the generation five and greater browsers, for both Windows and Macintosh platforms. We are also looking to use the same style rules for all of these browsers. This constraint makes the task more difficult and the final code larger and more complex than it would be for a browser with good compliance to CSS level 2, like Netscape 6. Thus, we cannot use those features that aren't supported for all browsers and sometimes the necessary workarounds to solve bugs or other problems yield a not so straightforward use of CSS.

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