Page 2 of 2
Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2006 2:28 am
by shoebappa
choppsta wrote:I have a wide screen monitor which is 1680 pixels wide so viewing a "fluid" site such as this, at full screen looks pretty ridiculous.
Ditto, but I do browse full screen most of the time. I like the room for tabs at the top but find fluid sites to be annoying to read with lines of text that run on forever. I'd have to think that anyone arguing for fluid sites prolly runs at less than 1600 (or in a non-maximized window).
I also find the ones with fixed width content and a background that stretches to look better and be more readable than fully fluid sites (which I realize is the oposite of what hockey said in the third post).
Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2006 2:32 am
by shoebappa
matthijs wrote:Also, for many "portal-like" sites with loads of info I think fluid works better because the page needs the space.
Absolutely and most things with columns of content, or anything you want to cram as much sectionalized content into. For an article or a forum, it just makes for long, harder to read lines. Though here when we have code examples line wrapping would suck.
Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2006 3:02 am
by CoderGoblin
As has previously been said a lot depends on the content. I think there is an acceptance that about x words per line (I seem to remember 12 but cannot really remember hence I wrote x) brings the most impact to the text, hence newspaper column format. If you have pages of short informational blocks, such as "free ads", they look horrible going all across the screen. One alternative is to place them in columns which works well but too many columns tends again to be distracting, so I would tend to go fixed width. I also find pages where you do not have anything else on the side columns (menus, adverts etc) tend to look better fixed width.
Where you have distinctly separate "columns" (menus left/right, content main column) or similar fluid contents can look better.