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How do you avoid action at a distance?

Posted: Fri Feb 18, 2011 2:47 pm
by josh
It seems in a complex CSS design, changing the padding somewhere can cause other things to go flying off the edge of the screen, which I may or may not notice. How do you avoid 'action at a distance'. I must be mixing multiple techniques that aren't meant to mix or something, for example I'll use absolute/relative positioning to get a bunch of stuff roughly into place quickly. From there I changed a "top:66px;" to "padding-top:66px;", this kept the design exactly the same except some random piece of text that using a negative positioning then flew off the viewfinder. I know enough CSS to figure out what's going on & how to move things back, but having to do this every 5 minutes while moving stuff around is a pain. In server side programming I use unit testing to pin down behavior, but I'm not sure about CSS. What technologies avoid this? CSS frameworks? Are there any that don't make you use framework specific CSS class names, as that would probably take me longer (having to also modify HTML). I'm trying to apply CSS to existing markup quickly & pain free. I do these designs from time to time but the situations I described here slow me down, is there any solutions?