1. Layout
   1. First Step - how I learned it 10 years ago
   2. Second - let's do it the CSS3 and HTML5 way
      1. replacing the table with div and CSS3
2. Format of storing page / article data

Layout

First Step - how I learned it 10 years ago

What I used:

• doing the layout with tables
• only minimal css

it looked like this.

Second - let's do it the CSS3 and HTML5 way

This means doing layouts mainly by using div tags.

replacing the table with div and CSS3

A div is in general a block that per default uses 100% of the container width. So several div blocks will stack up.
A good site that helped me can be found here.

Format of storing page / article data

There are basically 3 main options.

1. Writing raw HTML: Because this option is automatically supported by a browser (oh really? :) ) this was my first choice. But finally I grew tired to write all these markups. So I thought about a new option to other options.
2. Using a wiki like syntax
3. Using a WYSIWYG editor for my HTML

To write a full WYSIWYG editor was too much work so I decided to use a wiki like syntax because I was already familiar to write in that syntax. So the next question was: How can I convert my written wiki code into visible HTML?
I realized that besides this also another question needs to be decided: Should I do this rendering on the server via Java or on the client via JavaScript
I know that the client JavaScript approach is the modern and of course also more efficient way but as my site at this time was not yet prepared for this type of architecture (it was pure JSP) I decided to first go the server based way. And for this the site of Max Jonas Werner - Java libs for processing wiki markup helped me a lot.

Finally I ended up using *Mylyn WikiText* library. And the cool thing was that this library was able to extend my already existing html articles with wiki markup without the need to redo it all :)