MS FrontPage

Layers

Tables tutorial showed you how tables can help lay out a Web page. All in all, they do a pretty good job, but they do have some limitations. Complex tables with lots of cells slow a page's download time. And a lot of new Web browsers like those in cell phones and palm tops can't handle tables. And then there's all that tweaking.

You could spend a whole afternoon fine-tuning columns and rows to position a cell just so. After spending a little time working with tables, perhaps you'll find yourself wishing for some kind of magic table cell that you could just draw and place anywhere on your page. Well, in a way, you can. Instead of using table cells, use a layer.

Older browsers don't support layers. Instead, viewers using browsers that predate IE 4.0 or Netscape 4.0 will likely see a hapless jumble of text and images. If you know you'll have a lot of such visitors, you shouldn't use layers and may want to turn off absolute positioning options altogether. To do this, select Tools Page Options and click the Authoring tab. Turn off the CSS 2.0 (positioning) checkbox.