Now that most of the major browsers support full page zoom (at present, the only notable exception being Google Chrome), are liquid or elastic layouts no longer needed? Is the relative pain of building liquid/elastic layouts worth the effort? Are there any situations where a liquid layout would still be of benefit? Is full page zoom the real solution it at first appears to be?
+2
A:
i think liquid layouts are still needed, even though browsers have this full page zoom feature i bet a lot of people dont know about it or know how to use it.
John Boker
2008-09-15 12:20:14
Generally, it's the default feature now when people use zoom, as opposed to just text zoom. However you'd be surprised how many people don't even know you can zoom text in the browser.
Sam Murray-Sutton
2008-09-15 16:11:25
+10
A:
Yes, because there are a vast variety of screens out there commonly ranging from 15" to 32". There is also some variation in what people consider a "comfortable" font size. All of which adds up to quite a range of sizes that your content will need to fit into.
If anything, liquid layout is becoming even more necessary as we scale up to huge monitors, and down to cellphone devices.
Noel Grandin
2008-09-15 12:22:19
Surely full page zoom is a better solution to the problem of varying screen-sizes?
Charles Roper
2008-09-15 12:32:35
... and alternative stylesheets for very small devices, such as cellphones.
Charles Roper
2008-09-15 12:37:09
Another point worth bearing in mind is that full page zoom also zooms the graphical elements which, to my mind, creates a more usable experience on larger monitors.
Charles Roper
2008-09-15 13:44:33
+7
A:
Doing full page zoom in CSS isn't really worth it, especially as most browsers now do this kind of zooming natively (and do it much better - ref [img] tags).
As to using fixed width, there is a secondary feature with this... if you increase the font size, less words will be shown per line, which can help some people with reading.
As in, have you ever read a block of text which is extremely wide, and found that you have read the same line twice? If the line height was increased (same effect though font-size), with less words per line, this becomes less of an issue.
Craig Francis
2008-09-15 12:23:48
Do you mean, "doing **liquid layouts** in CSS isn't really worth it?"
Charles Roper
2008-09-15 15:12:49
+1
A:
Yes - you don't know what resolution the reader is using, or what size screen - or even if accessibility is required/used. As mentioned above, not everybody knows about full page zoom - I know about it, but hardly use it...
Raithlin
2008-09-15 12:27:08
+1
A:
I agree with John Boker. Not everyone knows about this. And I second the notions about screen sizes. Some people are using small resolutions. But at the same time, some people are using very high resolutions.
The.Anti.9
2008-09-15 12:31:51
+6
A:
Yes, yes yes! Having to scroll horizontally on a site because some designer assumed the users always maximize their browsers is a huge pet peeve for me and I'm sure I'm not alone. On top of that, as someone with really crappy vision, let me say that full page zooming works best when the layout is liquid. Otherwise you end up with your nav bar off the (visible) screen.
halr9000
2008-09-15 12:37:41
+2
A:
I had a real world problem with this. The design called for a fixed width page within a nice border. Fitted within 800 pixels wide minus a few pixels for the browser window. Subtract 200 pixels for the left menu and the content area was about 600 pixels wide.
The problem was, part of the site content was dynamic, resulting in users editing and browsing data in tables, on their nice 1280x1024 screens, with tables restricted to 600 pixels wide.
You should allow for the width of the browser window in dynamic content, unless that dynamic content is going to be predominantly text.
Anarchofascist
2008-09-15 12:40:43
+2
A:
Stretchy layouts are not so much about zooming as they are about wrapping - allowing a user to fit more information on screen if the screen is higher resolution while still making the content acessible for those with lower resolution screens. Page zooming does not achieve this.
Ola Tuvesson
2008-09-15 12:47:43
Good point, but fitting more information on screen is not always a good thing. Longer lines can be uncomfortable to read. Good designers will often specify a max-width to prevent lines from becoming too long.
Charles Roper
2008-09-15 13:42:53
Yes, I always use the max-width property with my stretchy layouts. It is well supported and prevents things going insanely wide on very high-res monitors.
Ola Tuvesson
2008-11-05 14:30:16
+1
A:
Page zoom is horrible from an accessibility perspective. It's the equivalent of saying "we couldn't be bothered to design our pages properly [designers], so have a larger font and scroll the page horizontally [browser developers]". I cannot believe Firefox jumped off the cliff after Microsoft and made this the default.
Bobby Jack
2008-09-15 12:50:38
The problem with the FireFox 2.x zoom is that it only affected text; if you had images with text, the images stayed the same size. The new behavior zooms both text and images at the cost of requiring scrolling.
Nathan Strong
2008-09-16 21:01:42
There were ways around that: you could specify the image dimensions in em units, for example. There are also certain situations in which you might want an image NOT to be resized, more legitimately than not wanting text to be resized.
Bobby Jack
2008-09-16 23:38:57
+1
A:
Only your own site's visitors can tell you if liquid layouts are still relevant for your site.
Using a framework such as the YUI-CSS and Google Website Optimizer it's pretty easy to see what your visitors prefer and lay aside opinion and instead rely on cold hard results.
liamvictor
2008-09-15 13:34:37
A:
Liquid layouts can cause usability problems, though.
Content containers that become too wide become exceptionally difficult to read.
Many blogs have fixed width content containers specifically for this reason.
Alternatively, you can create multi-column content containers so that you get an effect like a newspaper, with its multiple columns of thin containers of text. This can be difficult to do, though.