Although recently the trend seems to be more towards fixed widths or flexible percentage-based width layouts, from time to time I’m tasked with building a site with a liquid layout. Thanks to the demands of appropriately-ordered content and the challenges of having one column stay fixed in width while the other flexibly expands to fill the remaining space, these types of sites haven’t been the cleanest to make with CSS. One common technique that I’ve made a lot of use of was written in A List Apart called Creating Liquid Layouts with Negative Margins by Ryan Brill. It does the job, but it’s a semantic mess with a ton of divs.

I decided to try to find a method that pares down the div count, and makes the CSS a bit cleaner and more appropriate to the task. Lightning struck, and my mind put together a technique that feels like a decided improvement on accomplishing the desired task. I wrote about it over at Mindfly’s blog. Go check it out at Get Refreshed: Liquid Layouts with Simpler CSS and Without A Semantic Mess.