[thelist] front end design: liquid design

[Will]

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 8:09 PM, Blake <haswell00 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 7:02 AM,  <ekm at seastorm.com> wrote:
> > And honestly, in the real world?  Front end *developers* are hard pressed
> > to find opportunities to use fully fluid design, since *designers*
> > generally opt for control (or the illusion thereof) over flexibility.
>
> This is key. The developer is often not in control of the design *at
> all*, and must deliver to the expectations of the designers and
> others.
>
>
It's true. This is really a web designers discussion but it's also a good
reminder to developers that "fluid" can mean more than just "wrapper
width".  Making sure we use bulletproof(tm) techniques like sliding doors
and scalable font units. Using floats and repeating backgrounds properly.
Being aware of how things break and making sure they break gracefully.

Design wise, the line length thing really kills fluid for me. Slashdot is
unreadable and I don't really want to resize my browser window for a single
site. CSS' inability to know a thing about number of charachters/words in a
given line makes setting line lengths really difficult because, as has been
pointed out in this thread, setting it on a unit of measurement doesn't
really work. I like fluid designs that can fill up extra available space
with items other than more text. widgets that display more thumbnails as
they get wider for instance.

woa! I just noticed that gmail's ads on the right actually scale their
font-size as the window shrinks/expands. Line breaks remain the same.  I
need to click send now so I can open firebug without being nervous...