I pretend nothing, HTML is for structured data and CSS is for presentation of that data. Just because it doesn't do what you want doesn't mean the definitions a

I pretend nothing, HTML is for structured data and CSS is for presentation of that data. Just because it doesn't do what you want doesn't mean the definitions are wrong. CSS was never intended to manage layout, thus it has very little tools to do so. The HTML was intended to manage the layout. CSS changes the presentation of the document as structured by the underlining HTML. HTML controls the order of elements on the page quite well. What you are wanting is a reliable method to CHANGE the order of elements on the page. That is what I mean that CSS was never intended to do in the first place. HTML/CSS were developed on the idea of structured documents that do not change in real-time. You are wanting to take methods from a totally different set of standards and force-feed them onto this standard. Web pages were created to be static documents, much like printed pages, not applications. If you are wanting to control the order of elements on the page in real-time then I would suggest you look into having all your elements absolutely positioned inside a container. Then you can use javascript to move and hide elements all you want. Just keep in mind the pros and cons of doing that.