Chapter 12. CSS Positioning, Dreamweaver Layers, and Page Layout

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Layer Basics	424
Working Smart with Layers	442
Summary	461

Cascading Style Sheets can do a lot more than specify fonts and add table backgrounds. CSS positioning properties can also be used to control the layout of a web page by controlling the position of page elements. In addition to the CSS tools covered in the previous chapter, the Dreamweaver MX 2004 Layer object, Layers panel, and Layer Property Inspector provide a friendly and powerful graphic interface for working with CSS positioning. This chapter covers how CSS-P works and how to use Dreamweaver's Layer interface to make CSS-P work for you.

What is a layer? If you search an HTML reference, you'll find that there is an old Netscape 4specific tag called layer, but this is not what is meant by the term in Dreamweaver or by most web developers who use it today. Rather, layer is an intuitively understandable term for one or more page elements that, through application of CSS properties, are positioned and layered above other page contents. Throughout this chapter and this book, that's the way in which the term is used.

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