Topic: Which Page Width?

Hey,

It's been a very long while since i have posted.

I am just about to start a new project and the first question is - what page width do i use??

I would be intersted to hear what you guys are doing and why. I have read many articles and am still the none the wiser.

My options are 100%, em based, 950 and I read 974px widths are becoming more prevalent. I really liked the em based site I built - all elements were had em defined size so if the user selected larger font size by default, then the whole site grow - no issues with content displacement - just like the zoom feature in FF (which to an extent makes larger font sizes redundant??). - Got to be the way forward in my view, but some report browser support is buggy - is this still the case?

Your views and experience would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

An older but no wiser,

FR

IMO scalable layout sucks. A fixed width is so much better!

Mmmm, em for full-site resizing is unnecessary now, since all relevant browsers "zoom" by default instead of playing with text size.

reisio, do you still bother using ems for relative font sizes?

Sure, for text sizing it's still handy in that calculating double 1em is simpler than calculating double 17px, etc., and for the cascade.

Hello. This is my first post here.

I think the best width is 960px because it can be divided by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, etc... So you can made differents columns. And also there's a CSS FW made at 960px.

http://960.gs/

Regards,

Juan Manuel

Actually, I'm glad someone brought this up. I've worked hard to make my layouts fluid for the past few years, but it seems that, more and more, sites are going fixed-width. Most of the blogs I frequent are such.

A fixed width tends to be easier to control and predict, and since the trend appears to be going that way with little complaint from users, is there much argument to continue with fluid layouts?

It's pretty much all just practice for scaling layouts, which appear about the same for any resolution.

Depends on the site.

Fixed layouts assume the visitors all have the luxury of having a browser window with/emulating ~1000px width. good for you. It is simply wrong : there are plethora of devices from which people can access web content and not all of them have/emulate a fancy ~1000px browser window, ditto on some laptops and netbooks, and people who don't maximize their browser window ( *cough* Macs *cough* ) or have tool bars on the side of their browser window.

For case where what matters is the text content, I'd say go fluid or elastic. ( e.g. #body_content{ width:40em; max-width:80%; } ), and with regard to font size it's better to use em

However if the site is all about visuals, a fixed layout is justifiable and people will immediately realize that.


Wes: Maybe it's a chicken and egg problem: users who can't access correctly such content can't be bothered to complain for the simple reason that they can't find their way on such site.

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poi said:

Depends on the site.Fixed layouts assume the visitors all have the luxury of having a browser window with/emulating ~1000px width. good for you. It is simply wrong : there are plethora of devices from which people can access web content and not all of them have/emulate a fancy ~1000px browser window, ditto on some laptops and netbooks, and people who don't maximize their browser window ( *cough* Macs *cough* ) or have tool bars on the side of their browser window.For case where what matters is the text content, I'd say go fluid or elastic. ( e.g. #body_content{ width:40em; max-width:80%; } ), and with regard to font size it's better to use emHowever if the site is all about visuals, a fixed layout is justifiable and people will immediately realize that.Wes: Maybe it's a chicken and egg problem: users who can't access correctly such content can't be bothered to complain for the simple reason that they can't find their way on such site.

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According to this site 0% (rounded down I think) got a screen width <800px so a 800px wide site should be accessible by most people. But you have a point I know . But text areas should ALWAYS be fixed/have a max width or else it will be PITA to read by people with big screens.

Screen width !== Browser window width.

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... and people who don't maximize their browser window ( *cough* Macs *cough* ) or have tool bars on the side of their browser window.

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Also bare in mind that ~5% of the world population have visual impairments and I wouldn't be surprised it's just counting severe visual impairments and blindness. Add to that people [with low vision] who crank up the font size or zoom in on pages.

Plus The data you pointed are based on W3Schools' log files which is a niche site and not the best source for web developers either : it's a tad obsolete : they somehow promote table based layout, they don't know about semantic markup ( table fiesta, no lists, poor usage of headings, poor usage of class names, inline styling, ... center tag ), the advanced JS tutorial about animation is a farce, also look at the ads/content ratio ( including some ads that are in the markup emitted by w3schools ), ...

What with the number of people carrying browser-enabled phones nowadays, and their evolution into a more useable platform (rather than the humble beginnings of WAP-phones and their inadequate screens), one has to consider that a lot of people now are expecting to see 'full' web pages on their 'high-res' screens. Ignoring for the moment the fact that these 'high-res' screens don't even meet the original expectations of Windows 95 users, plenty of effort has gone into 'zooming' and 'smart layout' functionality to make them more useable.

In practice, as each web builder has different ideas on what constitutes reasonable expectation, no two web sites appear to work well with the same settings on all these devices; some sites forcing one to play with layout/zoom settings until things are more easily readable. The iPhone has an excellent approach that allows zooming to specific elements... but when these elements don't necessarily fit the screen, you're forced either to scan constantly from left-to-right-to-left in order to read as with the text body aligned perfectly on screen, the font is reduced to merely a small cluster of pixels.

What would work best for situations like these? Does one have to have knowledge of the various devices and their 'zooming' methods in order to make a site readable on these devices easily..? Does an inappropriately fixed width cause the zooming/panning issue with small device screens?

Now that I am starting to use mobile browsers far more frequently, I'm discovering a wide range of problems with sites that otherwise look great at anything above 800x600, but become a garbled mess below that.

Which way do you have to go to accomodate tiny screens?

Make it work with 800, make sure it scrolls nicely with anything less than 800 and depending on the content make it stretch to 1680 or more.

800 is a good size for many of us with 1680px wide screens who like to have 2 browsers open it's also generally a good width for reading anything .. just my personal opinion

From steam hardware survey: (http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey)
1280 - 21%
1680 - 18%
1024 - 17%
1440 - 11%
...
800 - 0.6%
This of course doesn't include non-gamers and hand-held devices.

I've always found the w3counter to be a reliable source of general browser usage and hardware config.

Hello Right of asylum (or political asylum, Greek: &#7940;&#963;&#965;&#955;&#959;&#957; nt) is an ancient juridical notion, under which a person persecuted for political opinions or religious beliefs in his or her own country may be protected by another sovereign authority, a foreign country, or Church sanctuaries (as in medieval times). Political asylum should not be mistaken with modern refugee law, and get some Generic Cialis for a better stamina in bed which rather deals with massive influx of population, while the right of asylum concerns individuals and is usually delivered in a case-to-case basis.[verification needed] However, the two may somehow overlap, since each refugee may demand to be accorded on an individual basis political asylum. This right has its roots in a longstanding Western tradition?although it was already recognized by the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Hebrews?Descartes went to the Netherlands, Voltaire to England, Hobbes to France (followed by many English nobles during the English Civil War), etc; each state offered protection to foreign persecuted persons.

Wes: Removed spam link.

(Edited by Wes on 10-30-2009 19:21)

WTF?

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Political asylum should not be mistaken with modern refugee law, and get some Generic Cialis for a better stamina in bed which rather deals with massive influx of population,

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gotta be a bot LOL

Later,

C:\