Welcome to the world of DTP-like Web page design. Everything on this page is absolutely positioned, as it would be in a desktop publishing page. Click the buttons to the left and right of this box to page through the text paragraphs, and try moving the mouse pointer over the images and the space in between them.

Now try resizing your browser. The result - no reflowing of text or images, nothing. As the browser window gets smaller, the outer areas of the page contents are clipped from view and you get scroll bars to let you pan over the page.

Why would anyone want to design pages like this? Mainly to make them behave like 'regular' desktop applications, with everything in fixed relationships to everything else. It also allows designers of online magazines to create page layouts which are just like printed magazines, although Microsoft has missed the point here by not allowing a combination of absolutely-positioned objects and continuously-flowing text running between them.

At the moment, designing pages this way is a laborious process, since you need to work out all the coordinates by hand and code them into HTML statements. However once WYSIWYG design tools catch up with the idea of absolute positioning, it'll be as easy as using a DTP program.

That doesn't, however, mean that automatically-flowing documents will become obsolete. Their ability to adjust to different browser sizes makes them the true 'universal client' documents, and for many (if not most) applications they'll still be a better choice.

The Royal Crescent, designed by John Wood the Younger, is the largest Regency Crescent in England.

St. Michael's Mount, at Marazion, near Penzance, is an island at high tide, and at low tide is linked to the mainland by a causeway.