Three-column design is a mainstay of many Web sites: a menu flows down one side (frequently, the left), with perhaps other links, news items, or even advertising in the other side column (i.e., the right).

As with the float property, one of the most common uses for absolute positioning is to create multicolumn layout on your Web pages. This is the kind of layout that was previously done with tables, using rowspan and colspan. Now it can be done much more efficiently (and with much less code), using CSS. Many of the layouts that follow are adapted from Owen Briggs' "Boxes, Boxes, Boxes chapter in Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation; these layouts, along with others, can also be found at Briggs' website: http://www.thenoodleincident.com/

One point should be emphasized from the beginning, however: not everything on the page needs to be positioned. Column layout uses a combination of margins, positioning, and document flow to make the columns line up side by side.

The content flows into a wider box in the center of the page. For this layout, you absolutely position the two side columns and then flow the content in between them with wide side margins.