HTML layout methods. Page Footer Layout

Good day, dear readers. Website layout is an interesting business once you start to understand it. The only problem is to truly find good materials for training. At first, the code may seem like an absurd set of symbols, but once you master the secret knowledge, it turns into a fairly simple and understandable algorithm, and also begins to generate income and moral satisfaction.

Today we’ll talk about what it is html block layout and css. The magical programming language will become less scary. I hope that by the end of the article you will have learned to see some elements of the code and will be able to make a firm decision for yourself whether you should get involved in all this.

Why are you luckier than layout designers who started working a long time ago?

There are two types of layout: block and table. At the dawn of time, layout was built in the form of tables. At first, only one, large one, was created.

The head, the main part, was built into it. One that includes a logo, some basic information such as telephone numbers, and so on.

Main content part. The text of the article, an introductory greeting, or something else.

The footer is located at the bottom. It is still used today. As a rule, small links to contacts, vacancies, and “About Us” information are inserted here. They can attach dates of the resource’s existence or simply the magic word “copyright”, with which developers hope to indicate or protect their copyright. Its use as a horseshoe hanging over the door can only scare away ghouls, although they, as a rule, do not look into the footer.

A little later, new standards appeared. Tabular layout was replaced by block layout. The “div” tag is block layout. You can look at the code of any site. Click right click mouse and select "View Element Code". Take a look at my screenshot. There is a block here home page, footer, left and right columns. They are all signed.

Modern websites are built from blocks; I’ll show you a schematic example so you can understand. The difference here is rather in the page code. You see, there is no main sign. Blocks placed in one or another part. Sometimes they can overlap each other or combine several elements, but one extra element (big table) disappeared.

The blocks are designed using CSS, which is a special programming language. It is difficult to get confused in it, it is less cumbersome than when using a table layout, everything is quite logical, clear and convenient for the layout designer. Thanks to blocks, you can solve more problems, it is much easier to edit documents, and pages load much faster.

Step-by-step instructions: how websites are made

Let's take a step-by-step look at how a portal turns into electronic resource. There's nothing complicated about it. Yes, you will have to make some effort to study, but this will bring not only moral satisfaction, but also a stable income. Layout is a business that not many people get involved in.

More than 80% of people simply look at an incomprehensible set of symbols, remember the school mathematics curriculum: logarithms, differentials - they go crazy, get scared and forget about this topic: “I’d better go and learn Chinese, it will be easier.”

You have already seen some algorithm and are convinced that there are repeating elements in the character set. This is great and, you see, it’s not so scary.

Let's now see how the website is created. First, designers work in Photoshop. They get something like this picture. While this is just a photograph, however, it has its differences.

It is produced in a special Photoshop format, such as notepad txt or Word doc. From psd, as this format is called, blocks are cut out. For this there is special button in the menu on the left.

After the document is cut. It can be “Exported for the web” and as a result, an images folder appears on the computer, which the layout designer uses to distribute pictures throughout the site.

I made this option in a minute, it is not correct. I just wanted to show you an approximate result. You can download electronic version my psd layout ( download ) and try to make your own, correct version, see what pictures will be useful for placement and how you will cut them out. At the same time, you will try to work on the template yourself in Photoshop.

For beginning layout designers and designers, this will be not only interesting, but also useful. Change colors, rearrange elements, modify the template and see what looks good and what changes you don’t like.

Your first site. Layout will take only five minutes

You can work on the layout itself in Notepad++. Today I will not touch on the program Adobe Dreamweaver, because This is the topic of a separate article, but I note that it was created specifically for layout designers.

Work on a website usually does not begin with the creation of a style.css file, but I think that this will be more interesting for you. This is the main document that describes exactly what your portal will look like. It's simple. You don't even have to learn English.

Background is the background color.

By double-clicking in Photoshop color palette you may recognize other colors as well.

This is what it will look like html document with a text component. Already familiar menus, bodies and containers... the h2 tag should also be familiar to you. These are the headings. Write your words in them.

Download these two documents into one folder and open with Notepad++, then edit the color and text, then run index.html from any browser ( download ).

The result will be something like this.

Congratulations. This is your first page on the Internet! You did it, you succeeded. Naturally, instead of color, you can insert a picture that was cut out from Photoshop into the images document. To do this, you just need to specify the path. As you can see, there is nothing super complicated here.

And finally... download video lessons

As I already told you, the most difficult thing in layout is finding good training materials. I myself started with books and only two weeks later I was able to make my first index file. Just so you understand, without a style sheet (CSS) it will look like this.

Agree, it’s not impressive at all. Therefore, I recommend that you learn the basics through video courses. Below I have placed links, by clicking on them you can download free lessons html and css. They allow you to achieve faster good results. In addition, reading requires much more willpower than watching interesting videos.

1. Html - lessons for beginners .
2. Css - lessons for beginners .
3. Free mini-course on website layout .

I wish you success in your endeavors. I am sure that very soon you will begin not only to study, but also to work online, and also implement incredible projects!

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HTML was originally intended to be a language that did not require any design features such as color, size, borders, or anything like that. Developed at the European Institute for Particle Physics (CERN), HTML was a plaything for scientists who were primarily interested in the logic of information rather than its visual representation. At that time, the concept of web design and layout as such did not yet exist; all sites were almost identical in design, in the style now called “academic design.” An example can still be viewed on lib.ru.

However, users predominantly thought differently and, looking at beautiful picture, gave preference to her. The developers of the Netscape browser understood this perfectly and introduced it into HTML new tags that improve the appearance of the document. These tags were not standardized and only worked in Netscape, which did not matter in the era of the widespread dominance of this browser. Netscape's share accounted for more than 90% of all existing browsers.

The influence of Netscape turned out to be disastrous for academic design, effectively burying it, and turned out to be beneficial for the development of web design. Website developers realized that design is not just colorful text and randomly inserted pictures. This is an opportunity to present material colorfully and effectively, to give a certain mood to the site, to interest the visitor and keep him on the resource. Design became the immediate stage of website development, followed by layout. The layouts drawn in Photoshop had to be turned from a single image into a set of images, style and HTML files that could be quickly loaded over the network, while maintaining the design features.

The Netscape age continued until Microsoft captured part of the browser market with its browser. Internet Explorer, which ultimately only brought headaches to website developers. Different approaches of Netscape and Internet Explorer to displaying a site, conflicting support for styles and tags, a large number of minor mistakes led to the fact that the site had to be tested and debugged for a long time.

Outdated versions of browsers did not fully support CSS (Cascading Style Sheets, cascading style sheets), so the code was a hash of HTML and CSS. This led to tables with invisible borders being used for layouts, which became the de facto standard for a long time.

The next stage in the development of website development was the birth of a specification called Cascading Style Sheets Level 2, abbreviated CSS2. Next came the Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 Revision 1 (CSS 2.1) update, which is still in use today. The release of new versions of browsers that support, although not fully, this specification, has greatly facilitated the work on websites. As a result, a gradual transition began to occur from tabular layout to block layout or, as it is also called, layered layout, in which the arrangement of elements on the page and their appearance are specified through styles.

At present, it can already be said that tabular layout is mostly archaic. However, there are still many sites like yandex.ru, artlebedev.ru and others, created with the help of tables. This conservatism is associated with the following circumstances.

• Layout with layers is more difficult than with tables, since it requires the developer to have deep knowledge of the CSS specification.
• Browsers contain various errors when interpreting style properties, so you should know the behavior of the main browsers, their errors and be able to work around them.
• Almost every problem can be solved in several ways; the developer is required to choose the optimal one, i.e. least expensive in terms of time and effort. Assessing optimality requires practical experience in order to have different methods in stock for specific situations.

Thus, layout in a simple sense is the process of turning a designer's work into a web page displayed in a browser. But you can get the same result different methods and it depends on the layout designer which one to prefer. The result of the site’s operation, the speed of its display, and accessibility for different devices and browsers.

Remember that layout is practical discipline and only by deciding on your own different tasks and by working on projects, you can master this art.

Why not one?

A fair question is why it was impossible to come up with one single way and develop it? But people are different creatures, so they came up with different ways. In fact, there are not many of them, and some are outdated today. Let's look at the basic layout methods.

Table

Creating a framework using tables. In the past, the most basic and popular method. Today it becomes outdated every year, although there are sites that are made this way. The entire method is tied to the table tag and its children, such as rows and cells. The entire site structure is laid out as a large table.

Advantages. This approach makes it quite easy to create many columns and columns. Layouts with a complex structure can be easily laid out using a table. Also, the table tag and all associated elements are supported exactly the same in all browsers.

Flaws. Very cumbersome code is the main disadvantage of table layout. It should be noted that you can insert another table into one table, that is, a nested one. This leads to a lot of nesting and a bunch of tags. And there is no escape from this, because all these tags are needed for the functionality of our table. Understanding such code is not very easy.

Tabular data is very difficult to adapt for viewing on various devices. It is much easier to do this with blocks (block layout, which we will definitely consider too).

Alternative. Not long ago, CSS introduced special meanings display properties, which allow you to simulate a table using actual blocks. For example, display: table, display: table-row, display: table-cell. Elements to which these properties are applied will begin to behave like a table, table row, and cell, respectively. You need to remember that this method is also imperfect, because it is not supported equally in all browsers. If you use these properties, you need to test carefully for cross-browser compatibility.

Frames

Once upon a time there was another typesetting method, but today it is almost forgotten. The essence of layout using frames is that the browser window is divided into a certain amount of independent blocks (frames), which are formed by the frameset tag. It indicates the path to the html page that will be loaded into the frame.

Each frame is an independent element. That is, scroll bars appear separately for each block. It must be said that frames were never officially adopted, so today they are practically not used and are generally considered a bad way of layout.

Rice. 1. I found this example of a site on frames on the Internet. As you understand, no aesthetics.

Blocks

Here we come to the most popular website layout technology today. It has a number of advantages and is generally recognized as the most convenient. Each block is an independent element into which you can nest an unlimited number of elements. The block can be positioned, resized, and stylized. All this is done with using CSS.

Advantages. Extremely compact code that is perfectly readable, even if you didn’t do the layout. Easier to snap to blocks various styles than to tables. Such a site loads faster and is better indexed.

Block Elements can be layered on top of each other, like layers in Photoshop. Given the support for transparency, you can achieve many interesting effects, highlight a certain area, or use a script to load different content in the same place.

Flaws. There are practically none. Blocks are easy to adapt, easy to hide and change. The div and span containers display correctly even in older browsers. If we talk about new semantic blocks, they do not have full support. However, this problem will probably be solved soon. Already today there are files whose inclusion solves the problem of supporting new elements in older browsers. The block layout method will exist for a long time due to its exceptional convenience and simplicity.

Flexbox (flex)

Most new method layouts. It received normal support in browsers for the first time since 2014. Now many developers adhere to this method. Its essence is that structural elements display: flex is written. These are also a kind of blocks, only more flexible and functional.

Many people still consider flexboxes to be not a very good solution for building a website grid. For example, it has long been recommended to use flexbox for small elements on a page, but many still use float for the page frame.

Most likely, in the future, flexbox will finally establish itself as a new website layout technique, so it’s worth studying the properties of this element now.

Rice. 2. The properties of flex elements make them more flexible than blocks.

The advantages of Flexbox include new CSS properties that allow you to build a variety of grids and columns without special effort. Also supported vertical alignment, which a regular block does not support.

Conclusion

The simplest and popular way Layout today continues to be a block approach. In some places, tables will also come in handy, because tabular data is completely inconvenient to type out in blocks.

Frames have long been discarded as an unsuccessful way to create structure, but the iframe tag may well come in handy if you suddenly need to insert another site into an article.

Finally, today we have absolutely new way layouts – flex element and its properties that make it more flexible and modern than the usual block. That's all for today. Don't forget to read new articles on the blog to know everything about website building.

The question often arises, what is layout? In simple terms, layout is the arrangement of constituent elements (text, headings, images, tables) on a document page. Layout is of the following types:

• Book
• Newspaper and magazine
• Layout of web documents

We will omit the description of the first two and go straight to the layout of web pages. To better understand what it is, let’s consider the process of creating a website. First, they create a design layout: they draw each page and all its elements. As a result, they get an image of the site, but it is just a “picture”.

Next, the resulting layout needs to be displayed in the browser, so that all the elements “come to life” and respond to user actions. At this stage the layout designer comes into work. Using the tongue html markup, it creates documents that the browser understands and displays them with familiar web pages.

Layout methods

When designing web pages, there are two main methods:

• Table layout
• Block layout

Table layout used to be the main one. The advantage of layout using tables is its simple execution and almost identical display in different browsers. Disadvantages - a complex and voluminous structure, which significantly increases the amount of code (compared to a block structure). To change the table layout you need to spend a lot of time and effort, and delve into the existing structure for a long time.

Today, websites continue to be laid out using tabular layout, but professionals have long switched to a more flexible one - block layout. Table layout is recommended to be used only for displaying tables.

Block layout is a staple among web developers. In block layout, the document frame consists of tags