I am somewhat a CSS Zealot as well, I understand the frustration with the clears etc. However, What I have done is position my left hand menu as an absolute. This has worked fine for my website and allows me to use clears wherever I want without breaking any styles. I use tables for tabular data and thats it.
<br><br><br>For example:<br><br>#outer {<br> text-align:left;<br> background: #c5d5a9;<br> width:760px;<br> margin:auto;<br> border: 1px solid #c5d5a9;<br> }<br> <br> #l-col {<br> position: absolute;<br> font-weight: bold;
<br> color: #333333;<br> width: 155px;<br> border-left: 4px solid white;<br> background-color: #F8D583;<br> border-bottom: solid 4px white;<br> }<br><br>#content_container {<br> margin-left: 155px;<br> border-left: 4px solid white;
<br> background-color: #eaeff3;<br> padding: 5px;<br> min-height: 550px;<br> }<br><br>The drawback is the container (Main body) of the page can be smaller then the menu which I give a min-height for firefox; I have a style sheet which loads if it is IE and it gets a height.... and another style sheet to take away the height if it is IE7.
<br><br>Anyways, it is just an idea!<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 7/11/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Darrel O'Pry</b> <<a href="mailto:dopry@thing.net">dopry@thing.net</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
On Mon, 2006-07-10 at 15:26 +0200, Steven Wittens wrote:<br>> ><br>> > I say this even though I am a CSS zealot and have created several<br>> > non CMS sites which have no tables and would do them no other way.
<br>> > I ended up using a single table in my design because in order to<br>> > get the footer in the right place the left and right columns were<br>> > floated. Once you have floated columns you cannot use clear in the
<br>> > content because the content will then clear the columns which is<br>> > not what you want. You need to be able to use clear in the content<br>> > so that you can float multiple images to one side and have them
<br>> > appear under on another which requires clear.<br>><br>> Non-sense. The piefecta layout and many others (such as <a href="http://drupal.org">drupal.org</a><br>> itself) are 100% tableless and can accomodate clears in the content.
<br>><br>> Steven Wittens<br><br>You may need an additional wrapper around you content to constrain the<br>clear, or a parent with position: relative. I can't remember.<br><br><br><br></blockquote></div><br>