Liquid Layouts not always appropriate ?

[Neredbojias]

Well bust mah britches and call me cheeky, on Wed, 23 Jan 2008 16:26:44
GMT Travis Newbury scribed:

I am dorayme's mantra!

Caution! It's whispered nocturnally that dodo is the marsupial equivalent
of the arachnid black widow. So watch your bod.

 

[Jonathan N. Little]

I have, all the time on msdn


We could continue to create scenarios all day long... What if this,
what if that...

This kind of brings up the point I have been trying to make. Nothing
you put out there will ever please 100% of the sites visitors.
NOTHING, not fixed width not flexible, not Flash, not "fill in the
blank here". You will never achieve a website that every single
person that goes to that site says "Damn, this site is perfect in
every way!"

Not what I am saying. What I am saying is if you approach the design
embracing the main attribute of the web: "that it is fluid and you never
no what your canvas dimensions will be", that your design will be more
suitable to the medium. Just because so many designs out there deny this
basic attibute of the web does not validate the fixed, ridged designs.
And as access to the web continues to expand to more and more types
devices this principle will be paramount.

 

[dorayme]

<[email protected]
m>,

I understood that. And Pixel perfect design does make that
assumption.


No they're not. They just disagree with you that's all. They are no
more wrong than you are. People have preferences and they tend to
gravitate towards those preferences. That is like saying people that
like the color blue are wrong.

Neatly skirting around the point that giving the clients exactly
what they want is aiding and abetting their eventual failure in
some cases. You never seem seem to recognise the responsibility
of a good author to put up a damned fight for what might be a
good thing. You are too ready to encourage authors to do whatever
the customer wants and you think all these ditties about the
world being full of choices equally good (I like blue, he likes
pink) is going to help justify this. Well, it is not going to
help.

 

[Travis Newbury]

Just pullin' yor leg. Business-wise, no argument stands up to your own.

I knew that, all and all,the regulars respect each other here even if
we disagree. (give or take a few jabs every now and then)

 

[Travis Newbury]

Not what I am saying. What I am saying is if you approach the design
embracing the main attribute of the web: "that it is fluid and you never
no what your canvas dimensions will be", that your design will be more
suitable to the medium.

And I agree with that, except when it doesn't apply.... ;-)

(There dorayme, add that you your favorite Travis saying...)

 

[dorayme]

<[email protected]
m>,

I am dorayme's mantra!

Bullshit. I harp on different things as the mood takes me. It is
just that I keep an eye out for you. You and Boji are my two
special chickens...

 

[Travis Newbury]

Neatly skirting around the point that giving the clients exactly
what they want is aiding and abetting their eventual failure in
some cases. You never seem seem to recognise the responsibility
of a good author to put up a damned fight for what might be a
good thing.

And one sign of a good author is to not decide on how the site will be
designed before you learn who the target audience is, and what the
owner wants to present.

You are too ready to encourage authors to do whatever
the customer wants and you think all these ditties about the
world being full of choices equally good (I like blue, he likes
pink) is going to help justify this. Well, it is not going to
help.

That is not what I meant at all. Sorry if that is what came across.
A good author will not burn any bridges before they know which one
they want to cross. What irritate me are those that say the word
"never do this..."

I believe we should never say never, we should always look at the
entire picture first.

 

[Travis Newbury]

You and Boji are my two
special chickens...

Mmmmm chicken

 

[Jonathan N. Little]

And I agree with that, except when it doesn't apply.... ;-)

(There dorayme, add that you your favorite Travis saying...)

You can continue to be silly but it does not change the reality of the
medium.

 

[Neredbojias]

Well bust mah britches and call me cheeky, on Wed, 23 Jan 2008 23:29:12 GMT
Travis Newbury scribed:

I knew that, all and all,the regulars respect each other here even if
we disagree. (give or take a few jabs every now and then)

Actually, regarding the fixed vs. fluid discussion, I think it's more than
a little like comparing oranges and apples. I personally believe that a
home/opening site page should be fluid, really fluid, but pages linked from
that for video, etc., can be totally fixed and available to those who want
and can use them. Naturally, it would be nice to have fluid alternates
available, also, but if you're designing/engineering for the state-of-the-
art hardware crowd, that might not be feasible and should not limit one's
option to offer a more "robust" (if rather proprietary) medium.

 

[Andy Dingley]

Confessions folks, how many of you have had to copy and paste part of a
badly designed webpage into a temp document in order to get a decent
print out?

<http://www.balsacabin.co.uk/>

which leads (eventually) to

<http://www.zyworld.com/balsacabin/Page1.htm>

So far this week I've converted it to Word (so that I could print it),
then to Excel (so that I could enter an order). I'll quite possibly
convert it back to decent HTML and give it to the site owner for free
- maybe I'll score a free plank as a result.

 

[Travis Newbury]

You can continue to be silly but it does not change the reality of the
medium.

Nor does it change the fact that we disagree on how you can use that
medium.

 

[Travis Newbury]

<http://www.balsacabin.co.uk/>

So you found a site where the author was inept at creating webpages.
This is NOT a difficult task on the web...

 

[Andy Dingley]

Travis, I know you like the eagle knows the sky; its clouds, its
sun, its lightning...

So just what _is_ the airspeed of a Travis, fully laden with coconuts?

 

[Andy Dingley]

Choice of what? Font size? window size? Who cares. As a developer
of a website I may not want to give you that choice.

As a designer, you might well _wish_ to not give me that choice.
However in the real world, you simply don't have the option. The
number of pixels I have, the size of those pixels, and the number I
need to use to see anything with are all user-specific, variable and
beyond the control of any developer.

Fluid design accepts this. It tries to work with it. It's not about
saying that "a fluid design is better", it's about saying that "a
fluid implementation suffers less from an unavoidable, variable
constraint imposed by the user".

Fixed pixel design has a long track record of looking gorgeous on the
developer's own screen, looking great in the pitch meeting, then truly
sucking when it hits the final user who has some different equipment.
So what are you going to do to your users in this situation? Turn
them away? (BTDT, seen the business fail as a result).

What are you going to do in a few years time? Is your 320 pixel wide
video still going to look so good on the 1080p widescreen TV home
infotainerizer? Maybe your Snoop Doggery just doesn't care, because
its business model accepts that yesterday just isn't profitable. For
most of us though, we want to build sites that remain usable through
hardware growth and last for a longer timescale.


Would you favour a banner that says "This site best viewed with
Netscape 4" and refuses to serve content otherwise? That's really not
too far from fixed-pixel design.

 

[Andy Dingley]

So you found a site where the author was inept at creating webpages.

By your rules though, this is a better site than a fluid design site -
because it meets the author's original artistic concept, which was to
make everything a particular number of pixels wide, come what may.

....And to make many of them bright purple.

 

[Chaddy2222]

By your rules though, this is a better site than a fluid design site -
because it meets the author's original artistic concept, which was to
make everything a particular number of pixels wide, come what may.

...And to make many of them bright purple.

I am not really sure that you know what Travis is on about.
As an example check out:
http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/flash-ing.html

 

[Jonathan N. Little]

Nor does it change the fact that we disagree on how you can use that
medium.

True. And we definitely disagree. I say this however, you can *choose*
to design with a fixed canvas point of reference but in no way will your
choice ever impose that paradigm to web as it exists. You cannot cannot
control the viewport of those who will access your site in a medium
where the canvas dimensions are not static. So I would say that
regardless of what you like, or even what your clients like, it is very
hard to make the case that a fixed dimensioned design is better suited
in a medium where the visitor's viewport is unknown. If the viewport is
small then the page must be scrolled about like though a peephole, or
when viewed widescreen it will be an island lost in an empty sea. As
opposed to a design that adjusts to confines of the viewport.

But then again, it took time for actors, writers, producers, and
advertisers, et al., time to realize that TV is not just radio with
pictures. For a time they tried to approach TV that way and resisted
change, but ultimately they had to change or fail. The same will happen
with this media.

 

[Jonathan N. Little]

So just what _is_ the airspeed of a Travis, fully laden with coconuts?

Is that an African Travis or an English Travis?

 

[Jonathan N. Little]

As a designer, you might well _wish_ to not give me that choice.
However in the real world, you simply don't have the option. The
number of pixels I have, the size of those pixels, and the number I
need to use to see anything with are all user-specific, variable and
beyond the control of any developer.

Fluid design accepts this. It tries to work with it. It's not about
saying that "a fluid design is better", it's about saying that "a
fluid implementation suffers less from an unavoidable, variable
constraint imposed by the user".

Bingo! Well put!

Fixed pixel design has a long track record of looking gorgeous on the
developer's own screen, looking great in the pitch meeting, then truly
sucking when it hits the final user who has some different equipment.
So what are you going to do to your users in this situation? Turn
them away? (BTDT, seen the business fail as a result).

No, you could have an army of assistants that will roam the world and
for anyone that accesses the site without the prescribed dimensioned
viewport on their device they would get the "V8-slap-in-the-head" and a
laptop with the "correctly" dimensioned screen. Hmmm, how about to make
things easier the laptops will only have IE on them!