@Allan Rasmussen: If you lay out the main structural components of your site with specific dimensions, and then apply either padding, margins or borders to them, you’re immediately caught out by the broken box model in earlier versions of Internet Explorer. This leads you down the path of setting up special styles using the various Box Model Hacks, and all the potential long-term maintenance problems that come from them.
By instead applying the necessary spacing to the elements within the dimensioned elements, you avoid this problem.
(You could have a look around the CSS Discuss Wiki, linked in the final sentence of Rachel’s article, for more info on these matters, if you need it.)
Nick Fitzsimons
@Allan Rasmussen: If you lay out the main structural components of your site with specific dimensions, and then apply either padding, margins or borders to them, you’re immediately caught out by the broken box model in earlier versions of Internet Explorer. This leads you down the path of setting up special styles using the various Box Model Hacks, and all the potential long-term maintenance problems that come from them.
By instead applying the necessary spacing to the elements within the dimensioned elements, you avoid this problem.
(You could have a look around the CSS Discuss Wiki, linked in the final sentence of Rachel’s article, for more info on these matters, if you need it.)