Workflow for CSS layouts

Many designers use CSS for styling fonts, but few venture further. This section—and,
indeed, much of this chapter—shows how straightforward creating CSS layouts can be, so
long as you carefully plan what you’re going to do. Upon working through the chapter, the
benefits of a CSS-based system will become obvious, including the following: rapidly editing
a website’s entire visual appearance from a single, external file; fine-tuning the placement
of elements; and creating flowing, accessible pages.
Before we begin, it is worth mentioning that some browsers have problems with CSS, and
this is often given as a reason to not proceed with CSS-based layouts. Of those browsers
still in widespread use, Internet Explorer 6 (and the increasingly rare 5.x) for Windows
causes the most frustration; however, that browser’s usage is in terminal decline. And
although Safari, Opera, Firefox, and Internet Explorer 7 don’t always see eye to eye, their differences are generally slight. For supporting earlier browsers and dealing with bugs,
there are usually simple workarounds anyway (see Chapter 9), leading me to believe that
many naysayers of CSS are negative because they don’t know how to create such layouts.