[Till]

Hi Darren!

What you long for is usually achieved by using nested tables and the infamous "spacer.gif".

Some code:

<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<!-- upper outline -->
<tr><td colspan="3" bgcolor="#000000"><img src="spacer.gif" width="1" height="1"></td></tr>
<!-- eof upper outline -->
<tr>
<!-- left outline -->
<td bgcolor="#000000"><img src="spacer.gif" width="1" 
height="1"></td>
<!-- eof left outline -->
<!-- middle -->
<td>
<table border="0">
<tr><td>
Random Stuff<br>
Search<br>
...<br>
</td></tr>
</table>
</td>
<!-- eof middle -->
<!-- right outline -->
<td bgcolor="#000000"><img src="spacer.gif" width="1" height="1"></td>
<!-- eof right outline -->
</tr>
<!-- bottom outline -->
<tr><td colspan="3" bgcolor="#000000"><img src="spacer.gif" width="1" height="1"></td></tr>
<!-- eof bottom outline -->
</table>

Some explainage.

This creates a nested table with a black outline (that is, if spacer.gif is black as well).

I have three rows in the outter table. One doing the upper part, one for the middle (that is left side, middle, right side) and one doing the bottom part. In the middle, I put another table to format it all nicely.

If you want to achieve something like DeskMod, you'd have to create seperate cells for the corners, instead of spanning top and bottom row accross all three colums (rowspan="3").

I included some HTML comments (<!-- ... -->) to show you what I was talking about. The eof shows you where it ends.

I hope that helps.