[clug] MtM - content update

[David Tulloh]

Chris Smart wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-03-13 at 22:18 +1100, Sunnz wrote:
>   
>> Why not just use a `liquid` design?
>>     
>
> This sounds good.. what does it mean? I'm not a web designer and am a
> poor programmer ;)
>
> -c
>
>   

The standard liquid design has several fixed sized elements with a 
dynamically sized element.
I've blocked out a typical liquid design below, each block would be a div.

<pre>
=========================================================
|                                                       |
|                  fixed size                           |
|-------------------------------------------------------|
|          |                                            |
|          |                                            |
| fixed    |                                            |
| size     |         dynamically sized                  |
|          |                                            |
|          |                                            |
|          |                                            |
|          |                                            |
|          |                                            |
=========================================================
</pre>


A simple liquid design is fairly easy to do, a google search will throw 
up a bunch of CSS examples.

In practice though I think it's impossible to design a liquid design for 
every possible size.  The above design will have problems at low 
resolutions as the fixed elements dominate the page and at high 
resolutions the text in the dynamic pane will get too wide to read 
comfortably.  You can improve things from this simple design but I think 
that you always have to accept a significant amount of degradation at 
both resolution extremes.


David