Question

By universal I mean a HTML mark-up that remains (almost) the same for multiple layout types. Almost, because there would be layouts where one or two columns are missing, so they won’t be present in the mark-up (eg. sidebars).

I found one here:
http://matthewjamestaylor.com/blog/perfect-3-column.htm

It works for the fixed / fluid type of layouts, but I was wondering if it’s possible to make it work with fixed side-columns, and fluid main column too.

Are you aware of any other solution that might meet this requirement?

Answer 1

If you want it pure CSS, you will need the css calc to do somthing like this:

width: calc(100% - 150px)

Calc is in the spec but, isn’t inplented yet

So you will need to do it in Javacript:

$('#main').width($(document).width()-150);

a fall-back CSS is required to not make it look broken in browsers without JS enabled