How would you explain CSS positioning to a human being?

Question

fellow earthians.

I, relatively sane of body and mind, hereby give up understanding CSS positioning by myself.

The online resources about CSS go to great length to explain that the "color" attribute lets you set the "color" of stuff. Unmöglish.

Then, that if you want to put something to the left of something else (crazy idea, right?), all you have to do is to set it to float to the left provided you set the "relative" flag on its parent block which has to have a grand-father node with the "absolute" flag set to true so that it's positionned relatively to an other container that may-or-not contain anything, have a position, a size, or not, depending on the browser, the size of other stuff, and possibly the phases of the moon. (CSS experts are advised not to take the previous paragraph seriously. I'm pretty sure someone will point out that my rant is not valid, or w3c-compliant - and that it only applies to the swedish beta version of IE6)

Joking apart, I'm looking for any resource that explains the root causes of all the crazyness behind layout in CSS. In essence, something that would be to CSS what Crockford's articles are to Javascript.

In this spirit, let me point out that I'm not looking for css libraries or grid frameworks like blueprint, or for CSS extension languages like lesscss. I've been using those to ease my sufferings, but I'm afraid it would be like telling someone to "just use jQuery" when they say they can't wrap their mind around prototype inheritence in JS.

If all you can point me to is http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565926226.do , I guess I'll consider myself doomed.

Thanks in advance.

EDIT : I probably should not have talked about "positioning" (thanks to all who've explained again that 'position:relative' does not mean 'relative to your container' and that 'position:absolute' means relative to something. I've never been so close to making a monty python script out of a SO questions). I think I meant layout in general (positioning + floats + baselines + all the nonsense required to put stuff on a straight line).

Also please excuse the ranting tone, I'm trying to pour some humour into frustration. I would use zen techniques to calm down if I could, but this only reminds me of this.

Answer 1

It seems most others have not quite understood the gist of your post. I'll break it down for you:

CSS positiong is complex because it was designed by many different groups of people over a long period of time, with various versions, and legacy compatibility issues.

The first attempts were to keep things simple. Just provide basic styling. Colors, fonts, sizes, magins, etc.. They added floats to provide the basic "cutout" functionality where text wraps around an image. Float was not intended to be used as a major layout feature as it currently is used.

But people were not happy with that. They wanted columns, and grids, boxes, and shadows, and rounded corners, and all kinds of other stuff, which was added in various stages. All while trying to maintain compatibility with previous bad implementations.

HTML has suffered from two opposing factions warring it out. One side wanted simple (compared to existing SGML anyways) solutions, another side wanted rich applications. So CSS has this sort of schitzophrenic nature to it sometimes.

What's more, features were extended to do things they weren't initially intended to do. This made the existing implementations all very buggy.

So what does that mean for you, a mere human? It means you are stuck dealing with everyone elses dirty laundry. It means you have to deal with decade old implementation bugs. It means you either have to write different CSS for different browsers, or you have to limit yourself to a common "well supported" featureset, which means you can't take full advantage of what the latest CSS can do (nor can you use the features there were designed to add some sanity to the standard).

In my opinion, there is no better book for a "mere human" to undrstand CSS than this:

http://www.amazon.com/Eric-Meyer-CSS-Mastering-Language/dp/073571245X

It's simple, concise, and gives you real world examples in a glossy "easy on the eyes" format, and lacking most of the nasty technical jargon. It is 10 years old, and doesn't cover any of the new stuff, but it should allow you to "grok" the way things work.