[thelist] Liquidity

[Janet]

Isaac,

My next question was going to be, "What are the pros and cons of ice and
liquid sites?" But, you already answered it for me. This morning, I sat down
in front of the puter, and the page http://www.discovery.com/ was up since
my husband likes to check it out. It seems like all of the highly
commmercial sites are ice/static sites.  I just hate that big wide strip
that I have to look at along the side of my 19 inch monitor!   Is it really
that hard to plan and execute a liquid site?  Or, is it just easier to do a
static site?

Hey, thanks to everyone on the great responses to my question about liquid
sites!

**************************
Others have already explained what liquid and ice sites are.

Advantages of ice sites include better control over
layout/structure/placement
of content within a site's shell. Disadvantages include having a little
600px
wide site within a huge browser window if you have a 1024x768 goon surfing
fullscreen.

Advantages of a liquid site include making people think they're special, and
that you designed the site especially to fit whatever obscure size they have
their browser set to. Disadvantages include crazy spacing, and stupidly long
lines of text that can be hard to read.

Something that can work is having a table set to around 75%, with a 600px
minimum. That way, it'll never shrink too much to crush your design, and
never
expand too much to ruin text readability. It can still introduce ye ol'
crazy
spacing, however - you have to think ahead with your content layout to avoid
that (and it's not always easy to do if you have limited amounts of
content).


I think I'll head to aardvark's site in a 2560x1024 browser again and wreck
his
stats a bit more... ;P


isaac
*****************************************