Liquid layouts

It doesn't matter if you do all the error checking in the world, or if you have the most beautiful graphics, if your site or application design isn't usable, it's not going to do well. Get input and advice on usability and user interface issues here.

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Luke
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Liquid layouts

Post by Luke »

Generally, the sites I build don't have enough content/text to fill even half of a 1024 x 768+ screen resolution, so what are the benefits of liquid layout if your site is lacking text/content? I really don't see any. Is it beneficial because of like pda's and such?
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wtf
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Post by wtf »

matthijs
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Post by matthijs »

Good question. I imagine a page with just a few paragraphs of text would not need a liquid layout. Would be kind of strange to have 3 looong lines of text at the top of the screen with large resolutions, instead of a nice column in the middle.

However, I think liquid to smaller sizes is more/also important. Then someone using a 400px mobile device can still read your text without horizontal scrolling. So some max-width can be used in that case.
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Nathaniel
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Post by Nathaniel »

matthijs wrote:However, I think liquid to smaller sizes is more/also important. Then someone using a 400px mobile device can still read your text without horizontal scrolling. So some max-width can be used in that case.
If we're discussing mobile devices, why not have an alternate stylesheet suitable to handhelds, if you don't particularly want a liquid layout for people with "normal" screens?
redmonkey
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Post by redmonkey »

In the limited front end work I do, I currently tend to favour 'elastic' (or whatever the technical term is for it) layouts.

It's almost the best of both worlds, they allow the designer to keep control of the layout/placement while maintaining that layout/placement if/when the text size is adjusted.

Although, I have no idea how mobile devices render/cope with elastic layouts.
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