The Importance of Visual Containers
There is no doubt that after the root-level element has been established that setting up a divisional tag for the purpose of containment is a very good idea for many reasons. Firstly, it gives you an opportunity to shore up the over all width of the document. I also would recommend placing a max-width: 775 px in the root-level body tag as well. Secondly, you can have control over the background color, which in normal circumstances is white. This may not seem like such a big deal on PC browsers but it is a very big deal on Mac Safari browsers which without a background color specification will default to no color at all and whatever is in the body text background specification will show through. This method of CSS2 site design was recommended to me by a code guru at one of the large internet consultancies in downtown Chicago. It is a method I have stuck to since acquiring. I have found out from personal experience in the development of my own web sites that this is generally always the way to go.
CSS2 Specification
The W3C sent the recommendation for CSS2 back in 1998. It is the reason why this web site exists in the first place. If you have not already browsed the specification already it is a good read.
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Tim Berners Lee
The world owes a great bit of thanks to Tim Berners Lee founder of the internet and author of HTML.
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XHTML vs. HTML 4.0
The author of this web site tries to support use of XHTML in the DTD tag for standard text based HTML documents.
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