Is Absolute positioning a best practice or should I avoid it?

Question

I am watching the ASP.NET learn video on http://www.asp.net/learn/3.5-videos/video-13.aspx and it is showing you can place controls on a page using Absolute positioning. I am just wondering if this is a best practice or should I avoid Absolute positioning? It seems like a nice, easy feature, but there must be some reason why it is not selected by default in the VS IDE.

Answer 1

Many users change the font size of your page by configuring their browser settings. If you use absolute positioning, things will not align right for them.

In absolute positioning, when your page gets more complex, a single design decision would require you to reposition all of the elements, but in relative positioning, you would only need to change one value, and all the other elements would adjust accordingly.