Fixed site width vs. dynamic: what is good web design?

H

Harlan Messinger

Travis said:
I with the exception of the entertainment industry I agree with you
(somewhat)

The problem I have with flexible is I use my browser full screen. I
am sure I am not the only person to do that. Many flexible width site
are almost unreadable because of the length of the lines of text.

Hmm, hmm, hmm. Do you sit in front of the television for hours cringing
your way through television shows with the volume too loud, wishing
they'd cut down the sound about 10 decibels--instead of picking up your
remote and turning the volume down? I mean, why are you opening your
browser so wide that you can't read the content comfortably? That *is*
the point--authors are advised to design their pages to take best
advantage of whatever viewport resolution and dimensions the user finds
convenient (or possible) to work with--not whatever resolution and
dimensions some user finds *inconvenient* to work with but for some
self-spiting reason chooses not to adjust to his own liking.
 
T

Travis Newbury

...If the text line is too long for comfortable
reading on a specific device then the user has options to narrow the
browser window or increase the text size.

Why is it ok for you to tell me I have to change the size of the
window or text size so I can comfortably see your flexible width site,
but it is wrong for me to tell you to change the size of your window
or text size to comfortably see my fixed width site? (and a fixed
width site that will accommodate virtually any font size)

Either way, someone has to do something to comfortably see the site.
This is why I say check to see what your customers want and provide
them with it. Not everyone. Everyone is not going to come to my
site. Build it for the people that are likely to come to your site.
If they want flexible, then give it to them, if they want fixed width,
give it to them. If they want all flash, then give that to them.

I don't try to build sites suitable for everyone. I build sites that
work the best for the given content. Building a site a certain way
because it is the current "right" way to build them makes no sense to
me. Know your customers, know what they want, and give that to them.
 
T

Travis Newbury

Hmm, hmm, hmm. Do you sit in front of the television for hours cringing
your way through television shows with the volume too loud, wishing
they'd cut down the sound about 10 decibels--instead of picking up your
remote and turning the volume down? I mean, why are you opening your
browser so wide that you can't read the content comfortably?

So it is ok for you to tell me to change my browser size or font to
see your site, but it is wrong for me to tell you to do the same.
hmmm, hmmm, hmmm .
 
D

dorayme

<[email protected]
m>,
Travis Newbury said:
Build it for the people that are likely to come to your site.

Come on Travis, you talk like authors are godlike creatures and
can know in advance so much about their visitors. You are a very
realistic guy who gets unreal as soon as pen and paper are before
him.
 
H

Harlan Messinger

Travis said:
So it is ok for you to tell me to change my browser size or font to
see your site, but it is wrong for me to tell you to do the same.
hmmm, hmmm, hmmm .

I'm not telling you to change the size. You're the one who's complaining
that your browser is open too wide for your own comfort, and then you're
suggesting that the author is supposed to anticipate your doing that and
save you from yourself.
 
D

dorayme

<[email protected]
Travis Newbury said:
So it is ok for you to tell me to change my browser size or font to
see your site, but it is wrong for me to tell you to do the same.
hmmm, hmmm, hmmm .

Not font. Not font. If all authors set according to good
practice, you will be comfortable automatically. That is first
point and it is amazing you have not grasped this one yet.

But the other is trickier, you are on a logical roll here Travis
and you must be stopped in your tracks. I see great dangers to
young people reading this. (Harlan is older than me, btw, he
called me Junior, an hour or so back, but I am not so young as to
fall for your sly symmetries of debate)

If you are sitting in front of your television and you are
getting rattled by some of the loud passages in it (it is a story
with lots of shouting), you can hardly sustain the stance that it
is equally up to the maker of the program to lower the volume.
 
H

Harlan Messinger

dorayme said:
<[email protected]


Not font. Not font. If all authors set according to good
practice, you will be comfortable automatically. That is first
point and it is amazing you have not grasped this one yet.

But the other is trickier, you are on a logical roll here Travis
and you must be stopped in your tracks. I see great dangers to
young people reading this. (Harlan is older than me, btw, he
called me Junior,

I just made that up, I have no idea how old you are, but I see you're
happy to let it go at that.
an hour or so back, but I am not so young as to
fall for your sly symmetries of debate)

If you are sitting in front of your television and you are
getting rattled by some of the loud passages in it (it is a story
with lots of shouting), you can hardly sustain the stance that it
is equally up to the maker of the program to lower the volume.

Sigh, my fault for wielding yet another analogy.
 
D

dorayme

Harlan Messinger said:
I just made that up

You don't say! said:
Sigh, my fault for wielding yet another analogy.

Don't apologise for analogies, they are the stuff of human life.
It is what makes earthlings go right and go wrong. To go neither
way would be a depressingly dull death-like road.
 
E

Ed Mullen

dorayme said:
<[email protected]


Not font. Not font. If all authors set according to good
practice, you will be comfortable automatically. That is first
point and it is amazing you have not grasped this one yet.

But the other is trickier, you are on a logical roll here Travis
and you must be stopped in your tracks. I see great dangers to
young people reading this. (Harlan is older than me, btw, he
called me Junior, an hour or so back, but I am not so young as to
fall for your sly symmetries of debate)

If you are sitting in front of your television and you are
getting rattled by some of the loud passages in it (it is a story
with lots of shouting), you can hardly sustain the stance that it
is equally up to the maker of the program to lower the volume.

It's not a good analogy. The reason the volume is too loud is that it's
not a volume issue, it is because the producer of that commercial or
program has over-employed audio compression in order to catch the
viewer's attention. Common practice dating back to the dark ages of TV
and when I worked as an audio engineer in broadcast TV production.

If there were a similar mechanism for TV/audio that exists in browsers
for fluid design, this wouldn't be a problem. You could tell your TV
set that "I want a minimum loudness as measured by my ears listening to
the speakers of xxxx." A better analogy. And then a well designed
audio track from a TV presentation would be designed to not attempt to
override that specification. Even better, designers would go: "Duh!
This annoys people. I should stop doing this!"

Of course, it is silly of me to expect that such a world will ever
exist. But I can delight in the control my browser (and TV volume
control) gives me over such idiotic designers. Oh. And that both allow
me to "change the channel" when something annoys me.
 
J

Jonathan N. Little

Travis said:
Why is it ok for you to tell me I have to change the size of the
window or text size so I can comfortably see your flexible width site,
but it is wrong for me to tell you to change the size of your window
or text size to comfortably see my fixed width site? (and a fixed
width site that will accommodate virtually any font size)

Ah, but as I said, with a liquid-layout your can keep your comfortable
text size and *still* read line by line of text without horizontal
scrolling. You have the easy option of narrowing the viewport if you
wish, but if you have the fixed-width site and the device's display
cannot accommodate the site's width your cannot stretch the device. The
two conditions are hardly interchangeable. Or are you now going to say
that horizontal scrolling the peephole is not an impediment!
 
H

Harlan Messinger

Ed said:
It's not a good analogy. The reason the volume is too loud is that it's
not a volume issue, it is because the producer of that commercial or
program has over-employed audio compression in order to catch the
viewer's attention. Common practice dating back to the dark ages of TV
and when I worked as an audio engineer in broadcast TV production.

If there were a similar mechanism for TV/audio that exists in browsers
for fluid design, this wouldn't be a problem. You could tell your TV
set that "I want a minimum loudness as measured by my ears listening to
the speakers of xxxx." A better analogy.

An analogy doesn't have to compare two things that are the same in every
single minutial respect. The point is that in one case the person can
turn down the volume, and in the other case he can not have the browser
so damn wide that he then complains when some author actually has the
nerve to design his page to use the space provided to it.
 
D

dorayme

Ed Mullen said:
dorayme wrote:

It's not a good analogy.

Depends on the point of the analogy. Travis continually looking
at websites at full screen is almost beyond belief when he has a
volume control to make the lines not so unreadably long. Make the
browser window less than 4 feet wide, Travis, and stop this
nonsense. Where are those blood pressure pills of mine?

The reason the volume is too loud is that it's
not a volume issue, [.., otherwise interesting
things about audio/tv production snipped...]

You are presuming flattering things, Ed, about me. I am not a
normal person. I often wear earplugs in theatre movies, taking
them in and out as the passages vary. I am even designing a
special headset that has shutter like controls on the openings
near the ear - anyone wanna invest, send $10.

It is true that, with me at least, it is not just a volume issue.
For me it is often an aesthetic issue. Huge quantities of
violence, people getting on very badly all the time, absurdly
unrelated music are not anything the authors can be asked to
provide defences against with technical procedures. It would be
like asking a serial killer to administer expert first aid to his
victims.

If the loud passages had a real point in a film that had a point,
I have been known not to need any assistance. The point is that
if it bothers particular people, it is they that must do
something about it.

If it is something likely to annoy more than the odd visiting
disgustingly cowardly martian, then yes, the author of the film
might well consider what he can do to stop annoying the shit out
his audience. That is where em widthing, max-widthing and other
technical solutions come in. This is where design comes in, where
technical wizardry is not even needed to save the day.

But you see, although Travis has this line of everything is cool,
horses for courses, this captialist world is the best possible of
all worlds, everyone relax, and all that stuff, he is the first
to squeal if he actually has to reach for his remote control next
to the chips and cookies on the table near the couch, never mind
the actual volume control on the set 5 feet away.

That's funny, my blood pressure just subsided. I have a readout
on the inside of my brow. Must be catharsis.
 
T

Travis Newbury

Come on Travis, you talk like authors are godlike creatures and
can know in advance so much about their visitors. You are a very
realistic guy who gets unreal as soon as pen and paper are before
him.

There is no God like powers needed to know who your probable customers
are.
 
T

Travis Newbury

Ah, but as I said, with a liquid-layout your can keep your comfortable
text size and *still* read line by line of text without horizontal
scrolling. You have the easy option of narrowing the viewport if you
wish, but if you have the fixed-width site and the device's display
cannot accommodate the site's width your cannot stretch the device. The
two conditions are hardly interchangeable. Or are you now going to say
that horizontal scrolling the peephole is not an impediment!


You do realize I am not an opponent of fluid design right? I just
don't believe that it is the only way to design a website.
 
T

Travis Newbury

I'm not telling you to change the size.

Yes you did.
You're the one who's complaining
that your browser is open too wide for your own comfort, and then you're
suggesting that the author is supposed to anticipate your doing that and
save you from yourself.

No, I am the one that is saying that flexible width is the the cure
all for the web.
 
T

Travis Newbury

If you are sitting in front of your television and you are
getting rattled by some of the loud passages in it (it is a story
with lots of shouting), you can hardly sustain the stance that it
is equally up to the maker of the program to lower the volume.


dorayme, I am not saying don't use flexible design, As a matter of
fact I have never said dont use it. What I am saying is that flexible
width is not the end all of Website design. Fixed width has a home on
the web, and will always have a home on the web no matter how much
some in this group seem to hate it.

The point I am making is while you can not ignore the rules and
trends, you also can not blindly follow them either. You have to look
the situation over and decide on a case by case basis what is the best
way to present this client's content. Sometimes it is flexible,
sometimes fixed, sometimes lots of javascript, sometimes none,
sometimes this, sometimes that.

As pointed out with my son's wedding video site. At first it looked
like all the other wedding video sites, and it followed all the
rules. Then I said, hey since a huge part of our business is putting
wedding videos on the web in FLV format, lets go really fancy and make
the entire site Flash, fixed width, lots of animations, and good
interaction between the page and the videos. Make the site
interesting, pleasing to the eye unique, and functional to the people
that are likely our customers. (Sngle women 18-30 is who we
targeted). The result was almost a 2 fold increase in business.
Enough to hire a new part time videographer as the demand went up so
much.

One needs to look at all their options, blindly following the pack is
not always the right thing to do.
 
J

Jonathan N. Little

Travis said:
You do realize I am not an opponent of fluid design right? I just
don't believe that it is the only way to design a website.

And my point is in order to suit the media, fluid design is a *very
important* attribute for web delivered content, that when ignore
(although not catastrophic) is to the detriment to webpage design.
Adjustments and considerations must be made with respect to the method
of conveyance. A design that may "work" printed in a high-end magazine
may fail miserably for a newspaper or a roadside billboard. You must
consider how the medium for the content and how it will be accessed. And
these are all printed media! Put the same thing on TV and it may be a
total failure. Many "web designers" are not taking the important aspect
of the web's "device independent" presentation into consideration.
 
T

Travis Newbury

that horizontal scrolling the peephole is not an impediment!


And my point is in order to suit the media, fluid design is a *very
important* attribute for web delivered content, that when ignore
(although not catastrophic) is to the detriment to webpage design.

Well we disagree I guess. Won't be the first time.
 
D

dorayme

<[email protected]
m>,
Travis Newbury said:
If you are sitting in front of your television and you are
getting rattled by some of the loud passages in it (it is a story
with lots of shouting), you can hardly sustain the stance that it
is equally up to the maker of the program to lower the volume.


dorayme, I am not saying don't use flexible design,... [... and further defence of taking each decision in life on its merits and not on some preconceived inflexible rules...]

I know this. I was addressing the specific thing about your
attitude to altering your browser window size to not let lines be
so long. Harlan has paid me (I am a happily junior consultant in
these matters) a great deal of money to defend his analogies and
I am just doing my job)
 
T

Travis Newbury

dorayme, I am not saying don't use flexible design,... [... and further defence of taking each decision in life on its merits and not on some preconceived inflexible rules...]
I know this. I was addressing the specific thing about your
attitude to altering your browser window size to not let lines be
so long. Harlan has paid me (I am a happily junior consultant in
these matters) a great deal of money to defend his analogies and
I am just doing my job)

Damn him! How much is he paying you? I will double it!!!
 

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