Quote from Ian.H :

Your first site Keiran produces a horizontal scrollbar for me at 800x600 browser window size as your header image is 800px in width and doesn't allow for the browser's vertical scrollbar.

Just an observation



Regards,

Ian

Yea, that one is me aiming more at the higher resolutions but trying to at least accommodate the minority who are on 800x600. With the margins in place you don't really lose anything important off the page if you happen to be a 800x600 user, well not with a resized window in Firefox .

Keiran

Quote from Ian.H :

It's not something I've done a "poll" on personally, just gone by client / user responses but agree that narrow would fit for the majority, but that does mean having to keep it below 800px width, but as mentioned above, not everyone has a full 800px width to play with even if that's their screen res.. different OSes / browsers / themes may even have different width scroll bars changing the actual browser rendering area etc. At least with a fluid layout, you can almost guarantee it'll fit regardless of render area.

Well, to be honest I'd really like to use a fluid layout with max-width applied, but despite that property being available since 1998 it's only just becoming supported in the majority of browsers. :doh:

Keiran: Granted, will give ya that was no problems with what I could / couldn't see.. I just cringe whenever I see a horizontal scrollbar on sites


Kev: I normally have a max / min width / height at least once in a site, min-height in particular to pad out main content areas to balance floating <divs> etc.. but of course, I also have to duplicate the CSS entry with a standard width / height attribute to keep IE happy and this doesn't always work out well (god how I hate that damn app! and wish people would learn that it's crap and use an alternative that actually follows standards). Does IE7 yet support it? Unfortunately it's typical m$ bollox where they seem to think their methods are far better than the set standards.. but always fall miles short in reality ("multi-user OS" anyone? hah) but yes, I really wish those attributes at least were more strictly followed in some of the more popular browsers.. the same goes for form element styling in Opera

Web development is made so much harder than it need be due to crap like this IMO



Regards,

Ian

IIRC IE7 does support them max/min dimension properties, but it probably does it in a buggy enough way to render them useless. I haven't had time to play with them yet - I don't really do much page layout these days.

I haven't checked into IE7 much tbh (need to install it in vmware as I'm not infecting my main box with it).. but you're probably right in it being buggy (isn't everything about IE? ).

That being said, I'd guess that IE6 is probably the most popular version of IE currently, which pretty much makes IE7's implementation null&void for a long time to come yet anyway.



Regards,

Ian

Just to add my point of view, I run a 3200x1200 desktop area, and really hate fixed width websites. Especially when they're designed for 800x600, they look so thin, I have to do tons of scrolling to read just a little text. I want to be able to choose how much width the site uses. Much like this forum.

I never run the browser fullscreen unless looking at a high res image, I usually have mine resized to 1140 square. So if you must do fixed width, I'd agree no more than 1024.

Quote from Bob Smith :

[ snip ]

I want to be able to choose how much width the site uses.

[ snip ]

I think you hit the nail square on the head there Bob. Users decide how their boxes operate / what views they wish to use etc, trying to force something on them doesn't go well with many.. the number of times questions have come up in web dev / PHP etc newsgroups for "how can I force..........." and the normal answer is either "you can't" or "you shouldn't force anything.......".

One example for me is sites that unnecessarily force javascript to be required for something as simple as pagination (even when not using Ajax style calls).. sites that try to force things upon me are normally skipped as there's plenty of others available that don't



Regards,

Ian

Quote from Bob Smith :

So if you must do fixed width, I'd agree no more than 1024.

Bob VERY few people run your type of setup, so why would someone make a fixed site bigger than 1024?
Most people use 1024. Which is actually a browser window size of about 1000x600'ish, so if you make it bigger than 1024 the majority of people are going to scroll.
Website shouldn't be made to suit stupid resolutions such as 800x600 or >1280x1024.
From a design point of view fixed sites look much better, and i nearly always create a fixed site. It makes sense (at least to me) to create a fixed site to suit the majority.

Heh, if there is one thing you won't ever get from web designers, it's consensus! Ask 2 designers, get 3 opinions.

IMHO it doesn't really matter in this case if you go for fixed or fluid width. Fluid layout is better for sites where readability matters: sites that people visit often, and that contain a lot of content. UKCTRA is not one of those, I think.

Fixed width can be a good choice if you want to do some fancy graphics, and need everything to be pixel perfect. OTOH, even with web standards and CSS-based layout you can make amazing pages; visit CSS Zen Garden to get a taste.

I'd say you can design for a width of 1024 px. But allow for some whitespace at the sides -- this makes it look cleaner, and it also ensures that the content is still visible at smaller widths (900 px, or if possible 800).

Quote from wsinda :

Fluid layout is better for sites where readability matters: sites that people visit often, and that contain a lot of content.

Rubbish. For example: http://www.bbc.co.uk
This is a great site. Very informative. Lots of people visit regularly. Easy to read. Lots of content.
It's fixed width and it works perfectly.

Quote from wsinda :

Fluid layout is better for sites where readability matters

I disagree, for reasons I provided on the previous page. And while you're right in that there is no "right" way to design a web page, any designer who knows anything about design will tell you that there is an optimum line length for written English, and it is much shorter than what is available on a modern monitor.

Great stuff, guys. Thanks

I reckon I'm going to design for 1024 width, so I'll probably have about 950 or so to play with. That should be plenty to work with

It's a long time since I tried to cater for the lowest deno. If what I was designing was a site where I was desperate to sell something (myself/skills included), sure I might consider it. That's not where I'm at, though. These days if you're on 800x600, I reckon you're the one that needs to ramp up rather than me ramp down and everyone else viewing along with me. Even if I were designing a sales site, for anything other than new monitors/PCs, I'd have this attitude. If you can't afford a half-decent monitor, you prolly can't afford anything my site is selling. That's just where I'm at tho. I'm doing a redesign because I feel like it.. catering for 800x600 would severely limit my enjoyment of the project, and since it's 2% or less of the viewing public, it's out the proverbial window. As soon as I read (ty!) that only 2% of visitors are likely to be on that resolution, the answer was there

I do wish the maxwidth property had taken hold before now.. but even then, I'm not sure that I'd bend too much to cater for a lower scaled window.

I do like the Zen site.. I've visited it many times.. and I am familiar with all of the design elements that have gone together to make the site a visual success, but even that one is quite easy to break with the resolutions available these days. Moreover, rescaling the browser may not completely destroy the design all the time, but it will *change* it. I would rather retain more control than that.

Quote from nikimere :

Rubbish. For example: http://www.bbc.co.uk
This is a great site. Very informative. Lots of people visit regularly. Easy to read. Lots of content.
It's fixed width and it works perfectly.

Unless of course I want to increase my font size, at which point it gets noticeably cramped instead of taking advantage of the masses of white space to the right.

In my opinion, that site would be much better if it used percentages for column sizes, and then limited min/max-size of the entire layout to reasonable sizes in ems. That way the site would scale with font-sizes, and would dynamically size itself to fit the browser window, but it would never scale to a point where lines are unreadably long/short. (This won't quite work on IE6 of course since it lacks min/max-width, but IE7 supports it without trouble.)

EDIT: A site I'm working that uses this principle: http://www.wien-systems.no/test/ (Note: Not quite hacked for IE yet!) Try changing the font size and window size and you'll see what I mean.

The web might be driving some technology forward, but the web itself is archane. The fact we are having this discussion at all is what strikes me as humerous - from my 3D programming background, and my applications programming, i'm used to making things fit different resolutions and that's usually achieved by scaling the 2D stuff down depending on the resolution, and 3D just works because of the nature of it.

When I started making web stuff I asked myself, "why doesnt the web work like this?", and the best solution I could think of is that the people designing the standards havn't made a real program in their lives.

Making something work at multiple resolutions is something every games programmer deals with, without too much batting of an eyelid. On the web it's a big issue because the tools make it so. Yet it's the web which is a medium where no two people are on the same resolution... I find it ironic that computer games programmers could just set your resolution as you go into full scereen and then be done with the problem - but we dont.

After all these years the web languages (browsers) really need to get themselves sorted and start catching up with a decade from living memory.

Comparing games and webpages might be a bit of a folly. Unfortunately there is no solid analogy to use - they're both textual and interactive.

Quote from Becky Rose :

The fact we are having this discussion at all is what strikes me as humerous - from my 3D programming background, and my applications programming, i'm used to making things fit different resolutions and that's usually achieved by scaling the 2D stuff down depending on the resolution, and 3D just works because of the nature of it.

Okay, I'll bite. Can Google index your GUI easily? Can blind people navigate it? Unix sysadmins in Lynx (a text-based browser)? How about cellphones and PDAs? People surfing with their Nintendo Wiis? Does it print well? And does it do all that while still looking good?

The web is an entirely different problem, with entirely different goals and constraints. A good web page has to do so much more than your average desktop app, so of course you need a different approach. I'm not saying the current one is the best possible one. In fact, it can be pretty damn awful at times (mostly thanks to a certain company not bothering), but it does the job it supposed to fairly well all things considered.

Well you guys said it all allready, my vote goes to 1024 too as minimum resolution, maybe if you could go with 2 version of the website, one widescreen, and the other regular 1024 one, with the viewer being able to choose on intro screen the version he wants, i don't think its that much work, im studying to be professional "webdesigner" as an overall graphic designer and programmer, my contact is [email protected] case someone want some help developing something.