Alice, take a look at pages on the web and decide which ones you like. Some are filled with javascript and fancy dynamic elements that you won't be able to understand in the source code, but when you do find pages you like, you can go into the View menu on your browser and open the source and look at it in a separate text screen that will pop up. Another trick, if you have a program like FrontPage or Dreamweaver is to have the page you liked highlighted and do "control A" (to select All) then "Control C" (to Copy what was selected) then in a new page of your html editor, do a "Control V" or select "Paste" in the menu. You'll have pasted the general format and text (sans graphics) into your page. From there go to the html view and poke around to see how they did it.

A nice example of a page that has it's contents confined to a table is an online newspaper I read each day from my home town--the Herald in Everett, Washington. It appears to float because once you've opened your browser window beyond the table margins it is set to float in the center of your window, but it won't get any larger than the table the designers established, keeping it a nice size to read and everything stays in place. It was designed so that someone with a low-resolution monitor will see this on their entire screen, but hopefully not have to scroll sideways to read any of it.

Good luck!

Robin, I'm not sure what your pages must look like when you finish, but I'm working in a university library environment where we aim for clarity and easy-to-view and print pages. I do this for a living, and my pages work fine. The various web folks who work with me on this agree that in general confining the content within tables keeps it looking better. I'm not actually sure what all you said you're doing--clearly there are different terms to describe the task at hand.

As to reading long lines, that's a personal preference on your part, and if someone designs a page that you can view a yard wide, you're welcome to it. I find viewing those long lines a fruitless exercise--I can't keep track of what I'm reading. As a web designer I assume 1) that people want to read my pages easily and they 2) don't have your visual acuity. I also assume that there are a great number of browsers out there, so I test my pages in several browsers and on several computers, and I design them to be viewed widely.

SRS