Posted by Jonathan N. Little on 01/24/08 15:31

Andy Dingley wrote:
> 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".

Bingo! Well put!

>
> 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).

No, you could have an army of assistants that will roam the world and
for anyone that accesses the site without the prescribed dimensioned
viewport on their device they would get the "V8-slap-in-the-head" and a
laptop with the "correctly" dimensioned screen. Hmmm, how about to make
things easier the laptops will only have IE on them!

--
Take care,

Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com

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