title: Is it considered bad practice to use absolute positioning?
body: <p>I was developing a web page, where I was laying out a board for a Chess-like game, along with a couple of piece trays. It's all done using HTML (with jQuery for dynamic updating as the game is played). Somewhere I'd got the notion that using absolute positioning of elements within a page was considered a bad practice, and that it was preferable to use relative positioning.</p>
  
  <p>After struggling with relative positioning for too long, I realized that absolute positioning of the board elements would be much, much easier to get right... and it was.</p>
  
  <p>Is anyone aware of a reason that relative positioning is preferable over absolute? Are there any guidelines or rules of thumb that you apply when deciding which approach to take?</p>