Posted by Nik Coughlin on 01/22/08 08:32

"Ben C" <spamspam@spam.eggs> wrote in message
news:slrnfpba2q.vlp.spamspam@bowser.marioworld...
> On 2008-01-22, Nik Coughlin <nrkn.com@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> "Synapse Syndrome" <synapse@NOSPAMgomez404.elitemail.org> wrote in
>> message
>> news:nrmdnVOGxuckhwjanZ2dneKdnZydnZ2d@bt.com...
>>> "Nik Coughlin" <nrkn.com@gmail.com> wrote in message
>>> news:fn33ic$589$1@aioe.org...
>>>>> Making that site with a liquid layout would bring a lot of formatting
>>>>> problems to the people making the content. It'd just be a mess.
>>>>
>>>> Um, that's simply not true. This statement makes me think that you
>>>> don't
>>>> really understand the concept of liquid layouts. This site would be
>>>> quite easy to make fluid. It wouldn't make any different whatsoever to
>>>> the people generating the content.
>>>
>>> Like how would they keep everything in sections, without it fragmenting
>>> too much? If it could easily be made liquid, why didn't they then? I
>>> /think/ I understand the concept of liquid layouts. I don't think there
>>> is much to understand, is there?
>>
>> http://nrkn.com/guardianFluid/
>>
>> I didn't bother hacking it to work in IE 6 so use a real browser to
>> view -
>> tested in IE 7, Firefox, Safari and Opera. Would work in IE 6 with
>> another
>> 10 minutes work which I have no intention of doing.
>>
>> It's very rough and I've only bothered doing the two main content columns
>> as
>> this is all that is required to show that it can be made fluid.
>> Everything
>> else is low quality placeholder images.
>
> Looks good. You have a min-width of 942px, where the original site sets
> a width of 940px and centres.
>
> So on a very wide monitor, I can fill the width with your version. But
> 940px is already quite wide.
>
> How would you make the page work at much narrower than 940px?

Move the search box so it doesn't slide over/under the GuardianUnlimited
logo. Or make it so that it dropped under it when they collide.

Once you've done that then the minimum theoretical width is the width of the
images in column 1 + the width of the images in column 2 + the widths of
columns 3 and 4 which are fixed. That's if you don't want the columns
dropping under each other (use floats), if you don't mind that then the
minimum width is the largest image or fixed widht column you have on the
page.

> If you make the viewport 800px and look at either version, you notice
> that everything still looks neatly laid out, just with no jobs or
> dating. You lose an exact precisely-measured slice of gubbins.
>
> I'm sure that's deliberate. I see it quite a lot on the web. This is
> another trick to do the sort of thing salmobytes was discussing the
> other day-- the discretely fluid compromise.

Yeah, it's all a compromise. But man those tiny little fixed width sites
look silly on my giant monitor.

[Back to original message]