Designing Good Very Web

Designing Good Very Web

(Exceptions: pixel sizes for images and point sizes in print stylesheets.
Since it doesn’t matter too much if one loses a little of the right-hand edge of the photo, it is quite acceptable with a window-size of as agent orange in thailand little as 450 pixels or even a bit less. Let the main body text be the size the reader has selected, and define all other text sizes relative to it, using em or %. It is not practical to get a truly “any size” layout which uses images, as browser resizing of images generally gives poor results.
. I therefore prefer the term “flexible design". ) Don’t modify the wife with cuckold husband base font size. An objection that is sometimes made to flexible design is that it results in long text lines if the user has a wide window.
True any-size design is however at present only possible if one avoids the use of images altogether; something which is not realistic for many sites. Still not convinced? OK, consider this. On the web however, one does not know either. ) Specify sizes as little as possible. Information could be passed from one computer to a user on another, without regard to the computers, the operating systems or the size of the monitors (if any). Firstly, what counts is not screen size, but cost dial low up window size.
This attitude is quite misguided for several reasons. Supply information using HTML, presentation using CSS (and, if desired, decoration using Javascript, Flash etc. A reader may not want a particular document to fill the screen. The whole idea of the Web as originally conceived was device independence. Try making your window very wide or very narrow, and see what happens. The result is just as unfortunate as if you let a newspaper photographer produce a television programme without him first learning anything about television. Site after site is made up to a fixed lay-out, as if the designers had been designing for a magazine page. The reader can easily reduce the window-width to what he finds life cycle recumbent bike comfortable: after all, that is half the point of having a windowing interface. Instead, it is easier to make each foreground image a free-standing entity, and assume that a certain amount of background will show through between adjacent images. Valid HTML should be displayed acceptably by all browsers. This is in any case a very time-consuming and frustrating thing to do, because the web is not designed to do this and it is very hard to get the alignment the same in all browsers.
Flexible designs require less maintenance, and the maintenance is easier to do. Producing a flexible layout is not difficult unless you make it so. Even if the reader's screen is big enough, a fixed layout may not look hotel inter continental chicago good.
This is, after all, half the point of having a windowing interface in the first place! Assuming that your web page has the sole right to occupy the reader’s screen is at best thoughtless, at worst insufferably arrogant. For further information, see the validation notes of my checklist.
(This doesn’t work quite as well in Internet Explorer as in more modern browsers, but still works reasonably.

By simply changing one number to an asterisk and deleting two lines of HTML, I was able to produce a reasonably flexible layout, and the owner’s problem was solved. Separate information from presentation. Firstly, it is always possible to split the canvas up into multiple columns, as I have done here for demonstration purposes.
(Perhaps I should mention that the floating won’t work in older browsers, but the page should still be readable. See my article on over-riding the reader’s font size.
That might seem to be an open door – a statement of the blindingly obvious. In particular, many sites were designed by graphics designers who applied their paper-based mindset without first acquainting themselves with the nature of the web. Once you get used to the concepts, producing a flexible design is probably easier than producing a fixed design. The essence of Flexible Design The essence of flexible design is the following two goals: the text of the site should be readable in any size of window, in any browser – or on a device which doesn’t have graphical windows at all; the complete site, including images, should look good over a wide range of window sizes, and acceptable over an even wider range. When one designs for a magazine page, one knows what size of page is involved, and one knows what size of type is likely to be legible to most readers. Or otherwise readers will switch to a better browser.
A browser typically has a menu bar, navigation bars, scroll bars, a bookmark list and other bits and pieces.
Nonetheless with a bit of thought one can produce a flexible layout which looks good over a wide range of window sizes. This objection is invalid for three reasons.
If you want to present information in this way, there is a good tool for it – Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF). In case you were wondering: the photo is of a Mandarin Duck, and I took it at Kew Gardens in London.
In design terms, the one thing you must not do is construct a site from lots of image fragments which must fit together exactly, where a difference of a pixel or two makes them look strange.
One of the strengths of the Web compared to paper is the ease with which it can be read by people with certain handicaps, particularly poor eye-sight. Furthermore, at least one of the commercial statistics-gathering services causes some older browsers to crash. Let the reader’s browser do the work. And what sort of person buys a PDA? Precisely: the “early adopter” with money to spare.
A typical reaction if you point out the problems of a fixed layout to a web-designer is “but everyone has a screen size of at least X by Y”. The minimum pixel font-size for legible print may differ by a factor of two or three, even ignoring the existence of visual handicaps among the readers.

Next there is the little matter of the new small-screen devices: Personal Digital Assistents and web-enabled telephones. With invalid HTML, there are no guarantees. Suppose you are a graphical designer, and get a commission to do a poster. I do that on several pages on this site. But: only when you have submitted the final version of the design, and can no longer change anything, will you be told what paper size the poster will have. It sounds utterly ridiculous, doesn't it? But that's exactly the situation that the producers of fixed layouts are placing themselves in. It had apparently been designed by someone with a 1024x768 screen who always maximised their browser window, and the company logo was getting clipped on smaller windows. Asignificant proportion of readers have Javascript turned off for one reason or another. The World Wide Web is not paper. If the SVG vector-graphics format becomes popular, it may come closer to reality, but photographs will still remain an issue. One way and another, it seems entirely possible that the statistics exaggerate the available screen hardware. Web MattersFlexible design of web sites This page discusses what flexible design (otherwise known as liquid design, fluid design or any-size design) is, why it is a good idea, and why it is much easier than many web-designers seem to think.