You will hear it referred to here as the “box model” (which is a
misnomer, but it’s caught on). What it means is that you draw an HTML
box as the container for a column of layout elements, then insert
inline HTML objects within that box and use them to contain the
individual elements of your layout. When you construct a page like
this, each element “makes room” for its neighbors, and when one grows,
the others get out of its way. This allows your page to react usefully
to text enlargement and other user-driven changes. Rather than
creating space between elements by dragging them further apart, you
change their spacing (vertical and horizontal) by adding margin space
to the elements. In many ways, it’s like treating HTML boxes as
individual characters of HTML text – the same sorts of rules may be
applied to them to govern how much space they take up in your layout.
Having the CSS button on or off only affects elements that you are
going to draw in the future. If your page is laid out already, you can
go through it and click on each element in turn and un-check the Layer
checkbox in the Inspector, and that element will become part of a
table-based layout. This change is non-destructive. If you re-check
the checkbox, you can move the individual element up from the table
“layer” (sort of the “zeroth” layer, below all floating CSS-positioned
layers) back into a floating layer.
There’s another use of Table that might become confusing in this
context. Freeway gives you the table tool (whether you are using CSS-
positioned layout or not) to draw tables with. If you have the “CSS”
button on, when you draw a table with the table tool, you are creating
yet another positioned DIV (layer) floating in the non-space of your
page layout, containing a single table of N columns by N rows. Any
elements you place within the grid of that table will be children of
the table’s layout DIV (positioned on its own layer, not governed by
the movements or dimensions of any other part of your page. If you
were to draw such a thing and put your form into it (using a cell for
each form caption, and another cell in the same row for each form
field) then any changes you make to the form using JavaScript would
change the geometry of that individual table, but would not be
reflected in the overall page layout – so if you had a footer below
the form, and you removed a whole bunch of page depth by hiding
elements of your form, the footer would not shrink up to sit
underneath the new, shorter form.
No matter what you do here, your text will still be styled with CSS –
the blue button and the Layer checkbox does not turn that on or off –
what will change is the layout mode for each element you adjust.
Walter
On Feb 9, 2009, at 9:10 AM, Egill Sigurdur wrote:
So you’re saying I have to re-do everything with the CSS button
turned off?
What is inline DIV layout model?
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