Topic: floating divs

http://thinkdrastic.de/asylum/think2/journal/

Any knows why opera(6.04) renders some tumbnails *under* the main content?
Fixes, solutions?

Thanks.

Hello?

The trouble with this kind of problem is that there are so many interacting factors that it's nearly impossible to give a straight answer. The only real solution is "screw with it until it works, and if you can't get it to work, scrap it and use a different method." I just spent a half-hour trying to get your page to render correctly in Opera, and I couldn't. In your position, I would cut my losses and either accept the Opera bug, or redo it using absolute positioning; or redo it using a different system of floats. I'm certain there's one particular rendering problem, and I'm certain there's a workaround, but I don't know it.

I fixed it using img-tags instead of divs with background attribute.
The final result can be found here: http://thinkdrastic.de/

Can somone of the mac users post a screenshot? I have no idea how the site looks at that OS.

Thanks.

I would have suggested using actual <img /> tags, also... I just assumed you had some special reason to do it like you had.

In general, you should use <img /> tags for anything that is meant to be an important part of the page; background-image should be used for pure decoration, things that wouldn't be important to a text-mode browser, for instance. On my (recent) pages, the main logo is an <img /> with alt text, while the "interface" graphics are divs with background-images.

I regulary use <img />, but it is being deprecated in XHTML 2.0. I tried a workaround - no use of <img /> - , but came to the conclusion, that actual browser are not able to manage that.

Definitely, still use <img> for images. XHTML 2 is still in draft form, and browsers haven't even begun to follow it yet. It'll be at least a year before this starts changing.

I don't know why <img> is being deprecated at all. If an image is central to the content of a page, it SHOULD be an element of its own, so that text-mode browsers will at least display its alt text and offer the option of downloading it.

At any rate, a standard should only be used to the extent that it is useful. Right now, XHTML 2.0 is definitely not. Do I try to incorporate "best practices"? Sure. But for the moment, eliminating <img> tags, particularly when they can have an important semantic element in a well-designed page, is not the best practice.

They're being eliminated because the <object> tag serves the same purpose. In addition, the <object> tag can display *any* type of media that the browser can support (flash, java, etc), and has a much more useful method of displaying alternate content than the <img> tag's alt attribute. The deprecation of <img> (along with <applet> ), I believe, will be a very good thing because of this.

Ah, I should have studied up before opening my mouth. I somehow assumed that they were just taking the "style vs. content" thing a little too far.

That said, I've been seeing more people than just U-Neek saying "well, <img> is deprecated, so I'm going to use nothing but background-image." A rethinking of <object> sounds like a good idea, but it also means that ditching <img> in the present remains a bad idea.