Grid design basics: Grids for Web page layouts

In this article, Craig Grannell builds on his previous article to take us through the basics of actually laying out pages on a grid. It is packed with essential tips.

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Wouldn't it be better to use em for sizing instead of pixels?

By using pixels you only get a rigid setup that totally fails for people who use higher font-sizes, which is becoming increasingly more common in today's world of high-dpi monitors.

Using floats for everything is definitely not the best layout solution because it simply breaks with liquid layouts. There is no guaratee that all floated columns will always remain in the same line. It's clumsy to make elements wide as the page when you need to have margins, paddings and borders. There's no easy way to create columns that span across different lines. And so on.

CSS layout does have lots of benefits over table based layouts, but has not yet provided all features lost in the migration process. There are at least 3 css3 modules regarding columns directly (grid, columns and template), all in draft stage. Let's see how long will it take for them to reach recommendation status.