Flexible (liquid) web design

[Daniel v. Wachter]

Hello,

Are other people as annoyed as I am about so many websites being
inflexible in width? I mean this:
* If I increase the text size which I, who has to read professionally
the whole day, find convenient, the lines are cut off at the side, so
that for reading them I would have to scroll horizontally. If I want the
whole width of these pages on my screen, I have to shrink (Ctrl + +) the
page so much that reading becomes inconvenient.

* Even if I can see the whole page when I use a wide screen, the lines
become far too long. In professional typesetting for books, lines should
not be longer than 65 characters. Longer lines are inconvenient to read,
especially for non-professional readers.

Examples:
www.mises.org: The content is excellent, but the webdesign inflexible.

www.lewrockwell.com used to be flexible, but now it is less flexible.
However, they have half solved the problem because if you increase text
size, the boxes on the right disappear and the box with the main text
has text flow.

Don't web designers today learn that web design should be liquid? Don't
they learn along the lines of pages like
http://www.flexiblewebbook.com/
http://www.htmlbasictutor.ca/flexible-liquid-design.htm
http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1324265 ?

The simplest HTML page is perfectly liquid!
Daniel

 

[dorayme]

Hello,

Are other people as annoyed as I am about so many websites being
inflexible in width? I mean this:
* If I increase the text size which I, who has to read professionally
the whole day, find convenient, the lines are cut off at the side, so
that for reading them I would have to scroll horizontally. If I want the
whole width of these pages on my screen, I have to shrink (Ctrl + +) the
page so much that reading becomes inconvenient.

I agree, of course. Your problem about horizontal scrolling can
sometimes be ameliorated on these less than ideally designed sites by
setting the zoom to zoom-text-only if you have that facility on your
browser.

* Even if I can see the whole page when I use a wide screen, the lines
become far too long. In professional typesetting for books, lines should
not be longer than 65 characters. Longer lines are inconvenient to read,
especially for non-professional readers.

I'd say much less than this, think newspaper columns as easy to scan,
and these latter might be more like half of your figure.

 

[Lewis]

In message <[email protected]>

Don't web designers today learn that web design should be liquid?

Nope. Most are morons and incompetent.

 

[Daniel v. Wachter]

Thank you, I feel better now because you understand me. A book that I
enjoyed and helps a lot is Cederholm's /Bulletproof Web Design/,
http://simplebits.com/publications/bulletproof/.
Sometimes people produce these inflexible, disfunctional web sites
because they install a CMS and don't modify the templates and CSS
properly. For these it would be better if there were no CMS and they
would have to use HTML. Isn't HTML, unless produced with Microsoft
products of course, wonderful? Many pages would be better without CMS.
There are good templates available, using just HTML and CSS.
Daniel