Use an elastic layout on your weblog, web "professionals"!
13 February, 2006I’ve had a couple of several-hundred-word posts hanging around on this topic for months now, but my frustration has finally got to the point where the technical stuff can wait – if you have a weblog which has centred text (even Hivelogic and Andy Budd fall foul of this) then make your contents elastic!
When I increase the font size of my browser, I don’t want to be seeing 6 words per line when there’s masses of whitespace to either side of the content container! I want that content container to be the main focus of the page! I want it to expand with the font! I don’t want the page to become less legible when I make the font bigger! This is not a swings and roundabouts exercise! Sort it out! Roger Johansson gets it right on 456 Berea Street, and you call yourselves web professionals – sort it out!
Comments
alf
13 February, 2006 at 02:46
Henri Bergius
13 February, 2006 at 08:12
Pip
13 February, 2006 at 14:08
Aristotle
14 February, 2006 at 04:40
Pip
14 February, 2006 at 19:40
Andy Budd
16 February, 2006 at 00:58
Pip
18 February, 2006 at 23:09
Yvonne
03 March, 2006 at 15:28
I was thinking about that today. Do you have a link for how to do the CSS properly?
A List Apart had a very good article on making CSS elastic layouts.
I think the best overall article is Roger Johansson’s Fixed or fluid width? Elastic!
The real key is using ems as a width definer.
The A List Apart article is good too.
Read Overuse of floats considered harmful before following the advice in that ALA article.
Wise comment from Aristotle there. It’ll be interesting to see how web developement layout progresses over the next few years and how we consider floats in the future.
I agree that elastic layouts are a good way to go. In my defense, andybudd.com was built at least 3 years ago before elastic design really took off. I really want too redesign, but just don’t have the time at the moment.
That’s fair enough, but you don’t need to do an entire redesign to make your existing site more usable and accessible.
I’ve done mine now (as a result of this post, though, ahem).