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Liquid layouts

Posted: Fri Mar 24, 2006 2:09 pm
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?

Posted: Fri Mar 24, 2006 3:02 pm
by wtf

Posted: Fri Mar 24, 2006 4:46 pm
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.

Posted: Fri Mar 24, 2006 10:02 pm
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?

Posted: Fri Mar 24, 2006 10:35 pm
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.