Cascading Style Sheets Archive

I’m not the most organized person and I’m not afraid to admit it. It’s one of the things that has drawn me to designing with HTML and programming with Javascript and PHP. With HTML things are designed to fit into a hierarchy of nested tags, and most programming languages are organized by functions and methods. There’s inherent organization. But one crucial piece of the web developer’s toolkit is missing syntactical design — that being Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

It’s not often that you’ll hear me say I miss something about designing with tables. Cascading stylesheets have made my markup cleaner, slimmer, and much easier to maintain. And, for the most part, designing with CSS has been a blast. I can’t believe I actually resisted moving to CSS for a while. But, there’s one attribute from the good old td tag that I sorely miss — valign. I used to find it very annoying that valign would always default to middle and that, for the most part, I’d have to go through every table cell and set valign="top". Now that I’ve moved to a complete CSS workflow, there’s no valign and, to be honest, I kind of missing the little guy. So, I decided to bring the power of valign to the twenty-first century.