Flanking Menus

With the popularity of three column layouts, this layout is bound to be useful to many. You may have seen this technique used at dynamic ribbon device. In fact, this "flanking menus" technique was devised by BlueRobot for that site. Surprisingly, the technique has caused quite a bit of talk. The concept is simple: a content box with large margins is flanked by two additional (menu) boxes.

An important benefit of this technique is the order of elements in the HTML source. Here, the order is essentially content, menu one, menu two. For old browsers, text-only browsers, screen-readers, and many alternative devices, this means that the content is displayed before the menus. And, after all, most users visit a page for its content.

Known Issues

This layout fails in IE4.5/Mac. That browser has poor support for CSS absolute positioning, yet it recognizes and executes the CSS @import statement used to hide CSS from broken browsers. Currently, there is no known solution.

what i thought

and i think i might just add another content section here with some uninteresting ramblings and thoughts about the fact that I thoughtlessly created this box of information.  And that is quite delightful.  I think this will be the template of my movie reviews.