there's nothing wrong with absolute positioning in theory, except that it's not flexible at all. If a user with limited vision increased the font size on my librarian trading cards, the absolute positioning wouldn't shift any of the boxes, and words would become hidden beneath the next section of the trading card. If you use relative positioning and floats, then the various boxes lined up regardless of the user's screen size and font size settings. In this case, the strength of the absolute positioning is that I'm not trying to make something that can be easily resized -- I'm trying to exactly reproduce the physical-world concept of a 2.5x3.5 trading card. But that's not what most web design is for.