D is for Division <div>

Look, no tables!

In the early days of the web the table element was there to display tabulated data. But in time, when the design crowd became more involved, it came to be used, and still is used, to structure the layout of a webpage.

The layout of this page is based around a table - in fact, nested tables.

But there is another way which uses the <div> element and CSS positioning.

The <div> element allows you to divide the web page into sections. Each section acts as a container for the elements you put within it.

Using the id selector you create named sections of your web page, such as navbar, masthead, textcontent, rightcolumn, and so forth. And then using CSS positioning you define how each section relates to each other.

The result is, hopefully, that you can use the whole of your viewer's computer screen no matter how big or how small, and the div-created sections adjust their dimensions as required.

That's the theory.

The main sections of this site work in this way (click here) whereas this tabled page you are looking at now is just a big table down the centre of the page.

D is also for Domain Name.

A domain name is a website's unique name, e.g. thisbrighton.co.uk

This name must be registered in the register of domain names, and it can only be registered through companies licenced to do so.