Posted by David Segall on 04/05/07 15:34

"Jonathan N. Little" <lws4art@centralva.net> wrote:

>David Segall wrote:
>> Gérard Talbot <newsblahgroup@gtalbot.org> wrote:
><snip>
>>> What is flexible, fluid or liquid design?
>>> http://www.html-faq.com/webdesign/?flexibledesign
>> At least this site does practice what it preaches however, on my "wide
>> screen" monitor, their solution to the problem leaves the bottom half
>> of the screen blank. I don't think this is any better than leaving the
>> right hand side blank. Of the four sites they reference only one
>> <http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/1999/10/desi/> attempts "fluid
>> design" and it illustrates why the concept fails.
>
>I agree there are few sites that practice what they preach, but in
>defense web authoring is still quite new, and just beginning to shed the
>shackles of print orientation.
I don't think they are "shackles". I believe they provide about 550
years of experience in presenting text to the reader and the
principles can, and should, be adapted to the computer screen.
> I believe you will see more examples as
>the concept sinks in.
More? Do you have a URL for just one of those examples?

I don't think that the "concept" is practical. I don't believe it is
possible to use only HTML to design a site that meets a visitor's
expectation of "good design" over the current range of computer
monitors. By "good design" I only mean the general standard of
presentation they expect to find from products on a newsstand.

Your own web site, <http://www.littleworksstudio.com>, provides a good
example of the problem. On our "wide screen" monitors there is too
much of the stone background at the bottom of the front page and at
800x600 Firefox, at least on my set up, seems to have a vertical
scroll bar that allows a visitor to scroll down forever without
reaching the end of the page. Please don't take this is a critique of
your site. My own site <http://www.profectus.com.au> looks terrible on
a wide screen because the right hand text is too wide and the heading
image on most pages looks bad when it repeats.
>
>> The text is far too
>> wide to read comfortably and the menu at the top of the page is
>> designed exclusively for a 1024 pixel wide monitor.
>
>Ah, yes I have a large monitor as well, but nobody's got a gun to your
>head forcing you to have your browser maximized at all times! I rarely
>maximized my browser and I usually have more than one app going at
>once...true multitasking. You can also bump your text size up a bit and
>it will shorten the effect line length. IE users don't have a hot-key
>for adjusting text size and rarely think to customize the toolbar to add
>the button so that have a tendency to settle for whatever the browser is
>set at.
Of course a visitor can fix the look of a web site by adjusting the
browser window. However, that negates the entire concept of "fluid
design".

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