This is an attempt to use CSS for positioning instead of tables. position: fixed tries to puts header, sidebar and footer on the top, left and bottom respectively. The main part of the document is padded appropriately to provide empty areas to be covered by header, footer and sidebar.

It is known to work well (the main section is even perfectly scrollable) with Netscape 6.2.1, but unfortunantely does not work well with Internet Explorer 5.5. If you find that this sample works well with other prowsers except for Netscape 6 (or Mozilla), please send a message to me: Anton Tagunov <tagunov@motor.ru>

I would pationately like to drop tables as formating facility for HTML and use them only to represent tabular data. Unfortuantely as you see I'm still failing with IE.

Also I would highly value your ideas on how to make this work with the IE family.

To create a test contents for this document I have taken the www.w3.org's HTML validator's face. To test scrolling I have put the same fragment multiple times.

Except for me not being able to work this approach with IE I also see that Netscape 6 takes long time to format all this even when loading from my local disk.

Here's a link to a message that has originated a realated discussion at hwg-techniques@hwg.org Richard Lake's message Unfortunantly this archive does not allow to access follow up-s of the messages (can you give me a link for an archive of hwg-techniques@hwg.org that allowes this?), so here's a link for a summary message from Richard: summary from Richard