Image Background Sidebar

[KELSEY'S GOT A GUN]

As we all know, many sites quite like having sidebars - they're easy to code, pretty nice looking when done right, etc.. However, one thing I've noticed becoming popular is the concept of image background sidebars. The idea's pretty simple; you make an image as large as you deem necessary to hold all of the sidebar's information and then place said information in various DIVs, while maintaining a fixed height of the side table. However, there's one bad habit I've seen a lot of lazy coders doing, and that is using line-breaks in these boxes. Now don't get me wrong; I love a good line break - who doesn't? But the issue with using them in an area with fixed height and width is that, and not everyone knows this, the height of line breaks are not fixed. Forums such as this one use these kinds of side bars, and they use line breaks. To someone with a lower or higher screen resolution than the creator of said forum/coder of the sidebars, the table could seem vastly or minorly out of proportion. The easiest solution to this would be to grab the image, see how much you would need to move the DIV containing your content down (under the information above, of course), and make an invisible DIV to bridge the gap. This ensures that everything looks the same for everyone and doesn't look weird to people with smaller or larger resolutions.

And I don't know why I wrote that. I guess I just have OCD and it was bothering me.