Comments on: Float vs Position in Layout: My Gripe with Andy Clarke

By: mrbb008

mrbb008 — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 06:37:45 +0000

Great article. I’m just learning CSS and I’m trying to figure out when to use float or absolute or relative positioning. I had no idea what the standard is for 3-column sites. Your article clears some of that up. Thanks.

By: Stephen Ward

Stephen Ward — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 20:28:16 +0000

I see your point, Eric. I believe Andy approaches things more as an artist and an innovator than as a practical web designer. This isn’t altogether bad; I think every field needs people like him to push forward. You’re entirely right, though; he seems to lose sight of the day-to-day work of web design in favor of his grand vision of the future. It’s a balance we all have to strike, and he’s way off to one side of it.

By: Eric

Eric — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 19:55:54 +0000

I can’t stand Andy Clarke. I find his book to be completely pretentious. He’s so full of himself and his idea of web design. I find the ideas in his book to be worthless. No business is going to want 5 different websites. Why pay this pretentious douche extra for various web designs? A business could save money and just have one design that works on all browsers. Especially, when the majority of users are using Internet Explorer. He’s whole argument is not applicable. What makes him the ideal of CSS design? Why is he so innovative? All he is doing is finding more complicated ways to do simple CSS.

By: Stephen Ward

Stephen Ward — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 20:55:36 +0000

Inman position clearing appears to be a combination of CSS and JavaScript, Jason. You can find more about it on Shaun Inman’s website. I have a feeling that Andy omitted the JavaScript code itself because it would’ve taken up several pages and added little value.

I could be mistaken, but I think Andy uses the term “static” in the design context to refer to an image rather than an (X)HTML/CSS web page. The latter, into which his Cookr! mockup seems to fall, is dynamic in the sense that elements can be clicked and styles can be changed on the fly to suit the whims of clients early on in the process.

Overall, I agree with you; the book has some confusing elements. My take is that Andy is more of a theoretical designer than a practical one. The talk early on about designing for cutting-edge browsers and the chapter on CSS3 should be proof enough of that. However, I did learn some very useful things reading the book (e.g., using position:relative to establish a positioning context is true gold). All in all, he knows what he’s talking about, but I don’t think all of it is useful for most day-to-day web design.

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 20:41:24 +0000

I am currently reading the book and I found this article very interesting. You make a good point in how the technique could be seen as contradiction. I’m actually on the “Cookr!” example too. What got me to Googlin’ is that I have no idea what I’m looking at… Is Mr. Inman’s technique JavaScript or CSS? I just see a lot of slashes and asterisks. What is frustrating is that Mr. Clarke assumes the reader is familiar with all this. Also, I’m confused with where the author stands with the discovery process. First he’s against static mock-ups because (paraphrasing) one cannot get the idea of interaction of a website from a static image, and then he goes ahead and bases all the examples on the static Cookr! mock… Confusing.