Tables to css - almost there

[Guest dazedandconfused]

I've been a tables web designer for some time, pretty much because I hadn't found this site. I've filled in many of the gaps I needed between basic text styling in css to designing a page to replace tables with css. I still have a few kinks to work out with the design, but it makes more sense than I thought it would.However, I could not find any references to this problem.I have a site where every page has the same template. There is a large cell in one of my tables where the content goes.What I'd like to do is design the page and save it to an external css file and then save the content to the individual html files.How do I get the html file to use the external css file and have some sort of "insert content here" tag?Example layout:-every page has this same header--every page has this same navigation-[content here differs from page to page]-every page has this same footer-

[Ingolme]

CSS files don't contain HTML, you can apply the same style to all pages (colors, background images, borders), but it can't add elements into pages (tables, boxes, text).For that you can use the PHP require() function, or you can decide to use javascript and load navigation menu data from an XML file.

[Synook]

You can use the :before and :after pseudo-elements to insert plain text and images before and after an element, but be aware that <tags> won't parse and they don't work in Internet Explorer anyway. Server-side scripting is the easiest way to go.