Learn CSS Positioning in Ten Steps

3. position: absolute

When you specify position:absolute, the element is removed from the document and placed exactly where you tell it to go.

Let's move div-1a to the top right of the page:

#div-1a {
 position:absolute;
 top:0;
 right:0;
 width:200px;
}

Notice that this time, since div-1a was removed from the document, the other elements on the page were positioned differently: div-1b, div-1c, and div-after moved up since div-1a was no longer there.

Also notice that div-1a was positioned in the top right corner of the page. It's nice to be able to position things directly the page, but it's of limited value.

What I really want is to position div-1a relative to div-1. And that's where relative position comes back into play.

Footnotes

• There is a bug in the Windows IE browser: if you specify a relative width (like "width:50%") then the width will be based on the parent element instead of on the positioning element.