Okay, so maybe I lied. Sometimes you have to do that to keep your pride in check after all, and if I were to add any more deadly sins to my list of web creation perhaps, maybe, if I dug deep enough... I did use tables for things that perhaps, maybe, if I dug deep enough... they shouldn't be used for. Like a teensy-weensy bit of design. Okay, what it really comes down to is those Photoshop layouts that I mentioned? Where they compress a whole bunch of images into a website for you by slicing up your largely created image into teensy-weensy (yes, I like this phrase) ones? Yeah, that's all done through tables. I consider it my redeeming quality that I did not actually put the website together and let Photoshop do it for me. The non-redeeming quality is, again, that I actually made them in Photoshop.
I'm sure that my previously stated god, Div, will forgive me. After all, Div is far more forgiving than Table, I have found. The truth of the matter is that once you wrap your head around it, Divs are beyond forgiving, they're ridiculous (or as we like to say in my circle, redonkulous). The unfortunate thing is that you do, indeed, have to wrap your head around them.
In my time of editting forums, blogs (like Blogger and Livejournal), and websites, I had definitely seen divs in use. The thing is, seeing a div and understanding what it does are two different things. I'm sure some witty person thought div for division or divide or divider or some such, but that doesn't mean that those of us staring at it for the first time after only being familiar with, yes my pride goes down the tube here, frames and tables even knew what it meant in the first place. I will be the first to admit that I had no idea.
Luckily, websites like W3Schools exist and once I got pointed towards it by my friends on del.icio.us, I began to feel like perhaps I did do have what it takes to be a web designer and cutter.
So, the question still remains: What is a div and how do I wrap my head around them? Andy Clarke has pointed me to the answer in his book, Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design, and it's really quite simple: Div gets you out of the box.
Unlike tables, which have to be laid out with such precision that they could be a playing card statue that topples at any sign of wind, divs allow a more flexible layout and the ability to move things around in places that a table can't comprehend. Going from an absolute structure to a relative structure is a freeing sort of feeling, and there is definitely a sense of power when you huff on your card castle and are then able to rebuild it in a way that air doesn't hurt it but rather keeps it hovering as if held up by magic. Divs can be below, above, around, beside, and between other divs. They can really go anywhere, hold anything, and be more stable than a mountain of playing cards.
The problem with this is, like trying to understand any god, one has to expand one's brain to believe in magic.
