Laid out by CSS layout

I give. Days and days so far of trying to get a decent handle on CSS. It's coming along — fonts, presentation, playing with text, giving stuff neat-o backgrounds during a mouse hover... all that I'm getting a decent grip on. I still have to turn to the book to remember half the syntax and pretty much all of the attributes and such, but I'm making progress.

Layout, however, is a Codezilla slapping me around like a redneck Saturday night.

CSS-P, or CSS-Positioning, is the layout/page design side of this madness. Here are some of the many things that I'm still trying to wrap my head around:

• Absolute vs. relative positioning. How these two are different, relate and inter-relate still is very fuzzy, as is how you set one or the other on the page. There's a matter of basic principle here that hasn't clicked yet.
  
• Z-index. The "third dimension" of layout. Determines which element is on top should different elements overlap. If only it were that simple.
  
• Why so much time was spent coming up with brand new standards but the W3C neglected to define something for columns, which is only how pretty much every site is laid out.

It's late, and my brain is fried. I won't even dip into my Beer Lao stash... it's straight to bed for me, despite my certainty that I'll have nightmares where I'm chased around by z-indexes trying to get on top of me, clear properties trying to float me left after a break, and id's that only determine themselves once and then mouse out, never to be used or seen or heard from again.

Hmmm... Maybe that beer's not such a bad idea after all...