"My underlying html structure doesn't need to be in any particular order in order to achieve the layout that I want." Sorry but in my experience you do need to

"My underlying html structure doesn't need to be in any particular order in order to achieve the layout that I want." Sorry but in my experience you do need to tweak your document order to achieve the layout you want. As an example, I made a (unreleased) site where I have "navboxes" floating on the left and right, and content in the middle. I had to put the floated divs before the content so that the top of the navboxes were aligned with the top of the content instead of having the content and then the navboxes below. That worked fine but I wanted to have the content first in the document because if someone accesses the page with, say, lynx (yeah, I know) I deem the content more worthy of being at the top than the navigation (that took a lot of space). Finally I decided to use absolute positioning for the floats I think (there were bad interactions when I put floats in my content), it's fortunate that I had this choice so I could get the document order I wanted.