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Posted by Andy Dingley on 01/24/08 12:08
On 23 Jan, 19:29, Travis Newbury <TravisNewb...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> > Good fluid design _permits_ choice. Bad
> > design (and bad fluid design) prevents choice. Pixel-rigid design also
> > prevents choice.
>
> Choice of what? Font size? window size? Who cares. As a developer
> of a website I may not want to give you that choice.
As a designer, you might well _wish_ to not give me that choice.
However in the real world, you simply don't have the option. The
number of pixels I have, the size of those pixels, and the number I
need to use to see anything with are all user-specific, variable and
beyond the control of any developer.
Fluid design accepts this. It tries to work with it. It's not about
saying that "a fluid design is better", it's about saying that "a
fluid implementation suffers less from an unavoidable, variable
constraint imposed by the user".
Fixed pixel design has a long track record of looking gorgeous on the
developer's own screen, looking great in the pitch meeting, then truly
sucking when it hits the final user who has some different equipment.
So what are you going to do to your users in this situation? Turn
them away? (BTDT, seen the business fail as a result).
What are you going to do in a few years time? Is your 320 pixel wide
video still going to look so good on the 1080p widescreen TV home
infotainerizer? Maybe your Snoop Doggery just doesn't care, because
its business model accepts that yesterday just isn't profitable. For
most of us though, we want to build sites that remain usable through
hardware growth and last for a longer timescale.
Would you favour a banner that says "This site best viewed with
Netscape 4" and refuses to serve content otherwise? That's really not
too far from fixed-pixel design.
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