For years now, I've wanted to make the navigation bars on my website stay at the top of the screen while you scroll down the page. Seems simple enough, right? Well, you have to understand that I learned HTML, CSS, and JavaScript back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, websites had visitor counters, and everyone was very excited about getting their screen resolution up to 800x600.

Back then, keeping part of a page permanently visible while the rest of it scrolled wasn't exactly easy or elegant. You could screw around with frames and framesets, which I did at various points over the years, but frames came with their own collection of headaches. They looked stupid, behaved differently depending on the browser, caused navigation problems, and eventually became especially awful once phones and tablets entered the picture.

So every few years I'd think, "I'd really like those navigation bars to stay at the top." Then I'd remember what was involved, decide I had better things to do with my life, and forget about it again for another couple of years.

My website doesn't exactly use cutting-edge layout technology, either. I started building this thing back in 2002, and a lot of the underlying structure is still based on HTML tables. That's how we did things back then. CSS layout was still something you read about in science fiction, and if your website looked good in both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, you considered that a major technological achievement.

Over the years I've modernized tons of pieces of the site, but the basic structure works, and I'm a big believer in the old engineering principle of "if it ain't broke, don't spend three weeks rewriting it just because some 23-year-old on Reddit thinks your HTML is ugly." There are parts of this website that probably still remember the sound of a 56K modem connecting.

Today, however, I decided to ask ChatGPT. I basically said, "Look, I've got these navigation bars across the top of my website. Is there some relatively painless way to make them stay there while the user scrolls without re-plumbing the entire damn website?"

ChatGPT says, "Sure. Use position: sticky."

I'm sorry, what? Apparently while I was busy teaching Microsoft Access for the last couple of decades, CSS learned some new tricks.

We tried sticking it directly on one of my table rows first. Nope. My ancient table layout looked at modern CSS, grunted, and went back to listening to its dial-up modem. Then we tried position: fixed. That worked, but because fixed elements are removed from the normal page flow, everything underneath jumped around and required additional fiddling.

Then we looked more closely at my page structure. Fortunately, all of the stuff I wanted to keep at the top was already grouped together pretty nicely. We figured out where the giant outer table started and ended, wrapped the header section in a DIV, and gave it three little CSS properties:

position: sticky;
top: 0;
z-index: 1000;

You can see it yourself if you take a peek at the years was working perfectly.

Now when you scroll down one of my pages, the navigation area stays right there at the top. The logged-in user bar stays available, the main menu stays available, and if the page has breadcrumbs and previous/next navigation, those stay available too. Because I already had a feature that lets you collapse the big logo bar, you can turn that off and you're left with just three skinny navigation bars taking up very little screen space.

Best of all, I didn't have to rebuild the website. I didn't have to convert 24 years of table-based HTML into modern CSS layouts. I didn't need frames, iframes, complicated JavaScript scroll handlers, sacrifices to the browser gods, or a weekend supply of bourbon. I basically wrapped some existing stuff in a DIV and added three CSS properties.

That's one of the things I'm really enjoying about having AI around as a programming assistant. There are plenty of things like this that I vaguely remember being a pain in the ass 10 or 20 years ago, so I don't even bother looking at them again. Now I can just ask, "Hey, is there a better way to do this nowadays?" Sometimes the answer is no and we spend three hours swearing at JavaScript. Other times, like today, the answer is, "Yeah, they fixed that 15 years ago. Where the hell have you been?"

Welcome to web development in 2026. Apparently sometimes things actually get easier.

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