Alternative to <table> layout in HTML

New CSS grid option:

<style>
#grid {
    display: grid;
    grid-template-columns: 20% 20% 20%;
}
</style>

<div id="grid">
    <div>first</div>
    <div>second</div>
    <div>third</div>
    <div>fourth</div>
    <div>fifth</div>
    <div>sixth</div>
    <div>seventh</div>
    <div>eighth</div>
    <div>ninth</div>
</div>

You should generally mark up your content semantically and then style it.

It looks like you have five main areas:

• messages
• user list
• controls
• input
• chatrooms

Let's make some markup:

<div class="left">
    <div id="messages">
        messages
    </div>
    <div id="user-list">
        user-list
    </div>
</div>
<div id="controls">
    controls
</div>
<div class="left">
    <div id="input">
        input
    </div>
    <div id="chatrooms">
        chatrooms
    </div>
</div>

And a little bit of style:

.left{
    clear:both;
}
    .left div{
        float: left;
    }
#controls{
    clear: both;
}

And you should be able to complete it from here. The most important part of most CSS layouts is proper floating.

Well, the basic way you do this is to break your page up into six <div>s:

<div class="left" id="l1">1</div>
<div class="right" id="r1">2</div>
<div class="left" id="l2">3</div>
<div class="right" id="r2">4</div>
<div class="left" id="l3">5</div>
<div class="right" id="r3">6</div>

Then you write some CSS:

div.left {
    float: left;
    clear: both;
}

And you should get something like:

1   2

3   4

5   6

No nested <div> needed.

Thanks for the link, that explains a lot. Sounds familiar, I've done this before, but it can be pretty tricky.

Before explaining the lot, I need to know whether you want to support IE6 with this. If so, you'll probably have to revert to IE quirks mode, as you will need the border-box box model (which can't be selected in another way in IE, and it's not possible to use both top and bottom properties). If so, I recommend to put all other browsers in this box model, too, so you don't have to make two separate stylesheets for IE and the rest (yes, you'll still need some workarounds, of course). In short, after using this different box model you can have quasi top and bottom properties by styling using border-top and border-bottom, instead. They'll act like top and bottom, because they're now inside the given height (of, for instance, 100% of the viewport). I hope this is at least a bit understandable.

If not, than it's a bit simpler and you can style using fixed positioning and <div> getting top and bottom properties. IIRC, this should also work in IE7+.

But first, tell me whether you need support for the buggy one or not...