Posted by whytwelve13 on 09/12/06 14:24

> Are you suggesting the content of your pages ("can be clipped") is less
> important than the framework (header, footer, menu, etc.)?

Greg, thanks for your reply.

My rationale:
Header with the menu and the footer will be very small (around 100px
together in height, 100% width). The reason I want this is primarily to
be able to have menu visible all the time. Content will not be big, so
clipping will not occur very often. For these times when it occurs
(e.g. when you resize your browser to be too small), I would still like
to have the menu available, rather then content. This way I hope people
will understand resizing browser to 100x100 pixels is not a good thing
(most of the times).

The important thing is that this is not really a "pure-HTML" site,
rather a small Web application. Thus, I think being able to reach
functionality in one click is more important then being able to reach
content itself (if you resized window to 100x100 pixels, then it's your
fault you cannot see it all). You can look at this like you look at
e.g. MS Word - you have menu, toolbars, ... that don't scroll when you
scroll your 500-page document and it doesn't matter - it is still good,
since content part is much bigger (or: big enough) then the menu and
other things together. Think about having to scroll up 200 pages,
select Edit/Paste and then going way down where you were, searching for
the pasted text.

Look at this Web application as if it was Word (or Outlook or
PowerPoint or such), but where content is really small (400 - 600px is
completely OK). There will be some fields in that part that should be
editable, you make changes, click here and there, but you might decide
you need to do something from the menu, quick.

Anyway, even with tables (i.e. non-CSS solution) I am having problems
making fixed-size header and footer (eg. 80px and 20px, respectively)
and having scroll bars on the content part (and have it occupy the
remaining of the area). I can get scroll bars on the body, but that
will not work as I planned (you could scroll the menu out of the
screen).

Hope I have explained my needs better this time. Do you agree or have
any other thoughts/better solutions? Do you think what I am trying is
not a good idea after all and, if so, what would be your solution?

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