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Create multicolumn lists

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by maryweilage

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In this week's Design and Usability Tactics newsletter, Michael Meadhra provides tips on how to create multicolumn lists.

Which of these multicolumn list techniques fit best with your approach to page layout? Do you use CSS to create multicolumn lists and text, or do you fall back on tables when you need to work with columns?

5 replies

by ryan

Good article and content, had never seen the

    before. Thanks!

    However, the rest of the article seems tremendously similar to
    one of Holly 'n Johns pieces published earlier this week at
    Community MX. It goes a little more in depth to the floating and
    resizing shenanigan prevention via ems, and credits some other
    prior art:

    http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=27F87

    Looks like yet another instance of near-simultaneous invention
    hitting the CSS-layout world!

by meadhra

Hmmm, this is interesting. I submitted the article to Builder.com for editing and processing almost a week before the Community MX piece was released, so there's no way either article was copied from the other.

That said, none of us work in a vacumn (or at least, we shouldn't). I frequently read articles by Big John & Holly, Eric Meyer, and many others when researching a topic for a project or article. It's not practical to mention every article I've read as general background on a topic, but I always try to credit the originator of a specific, detailed technique or major work.

Michael Meadhra

by elliott

Okay, I am new to your articles, just subscribed last week, so have probably missed out on something important said previously. So I will probably be sorry I asked this question and end up looking very foolish, but hey, tossing-caution to-the-wind.............

What is wrong with just using tables to create columns?

by johnthebig66

Visually, a table can create these columns just as, or more easily than a list that is manipulated this way. The difference is in the structure of the source. Three table cells in a row form three discrete lumps of content, but logically this is a single list, not three seperate lists.

By using a single list in the source and having it be split up only via CSS, that clean contnt structure of a single list is not altered. This can really matter if you should ever become blind and have to have pages read to you by a screen reader.

Also, future search engines might be able to take structural lists into account, but only if you actually employ real lists and not segmented tables to display a list in several columns.

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