Meta, Poll: fixed or variable width content for Engadget?
By Ryan Block 
posted May 21st 2008 4:09PM
posted May 21st 2008 4:09PM
| I'm down with the mega-wide -- leave things as is! | |
|---|---|
| I'm into variable width, but it just gets TOO wide. Cut it back some. | |
| Bring it down and make it fixed-width, there should still be plenty of room. | |
| I really don't care. | |
| I only read in RSS -- have you heard of it? |
There are properties called max-width and min-width available in CSS.
My style rules... let me show you them:
body {
min-width: 800px;
max-width: 1440px;
}
I'm gunna take a wild guess here and assume that you guys actually have nothing to do with the design of the site, more likely you just go to the web designer and say: make it moar bigger!!!
In which case, just tell him to do what he thinks is best... trust me, web designers know better than NoobCommenter69, who thinks every page should look be fixed at the exact resolution of his or her monitor.
This is what you want!
www.positioniseverything.net/articles/jello.html
The Jello mold layout! Negative margins min and max width compatible with firefox and crap browsers!
Geez,
If you're running your browser in full screen mode on a hi-res screen, suit yourself. Stop complaining about the text being too wide. It's _really_ simple; resize your browser window. Fixed width sucks, everywhere, every time. I browse Engadget on 3 different laptops, one desktop, the Wii, my mobile phone and my N800. There's no way fixed width will suit all these devices.
Just got to say I use a 24" 1920x1200 screen to surff the webm and on my screen the page is perfect. I cant stand pages that are too riged and are like a tiny dot in the center of my screen, forcing me to squint to read.
I don't really care how wide a window is allowed. However, I do like to look at engadget on my windows mobile phone. Please keep in mind that some of us access this site with low resolution screens (320x240, etc.)
Is that why comment boxes and pictures hop around when I mouse over them?
I'm on Firefox @ 1920x1200, IMO the site renders perfectly. I'm seeing about 900px for the main content, with 330px for the sidebar and about 330px for both margins.
http://www.positioniseverything.net/articles/sidepages/pie-calc.php
I used this on my client website. Its a hybrid between fluid and fixed widith. Basically it works in all browsers and allows your columns to be fluid up to a specific width. Therefore it can prevent a column from being TO big or small but inbetween it will still act fluid. I think this is a perfect solution.
Variable width means that, no matter which computer I use, content is constantly shifting around. Whenever I mouse over a picture the entire article will shift to the side. Same with comments - usually replies are directly underneath the original post, making their status as replies hard to notice. Yet, if I mouse over the avatar of the poster (or the link), they'll suddenly shift over and indent themselves.
This is all after the page loads, too. During the loading time, which is admittedly only a few seconds, everything is jumping like crazy. Hell, this poll is halfway through the page but for about two seconds it was overlapping the top article.
Drives me insane. This website is horribly coded.
I don't know what browser you're using but those issues you describe have nothing to do with the site, always been perfect for me.
I use Safari btw, be it on my mac, windows or phone.
I still don't have any problems if I happen to be using a computer with firefox or IE either.
Considering that the vast majority of my time on this site is while at work, and I'd imagine that goes for many of us, I don't have the option of using a different browser.
Internet Explorer 6.0 is still the most common browser. By far.
I forgot to mention the amount of times I've scrolled down partially on the page only to have the width adjust and, rather than keeping me on where I'm reading, it keeps me how far I've scrolled, which usually means I get dumped to the very bottom of the page.
Similarly, when I click to view the comments it'll shove me down to about three or four comments down. Only rarely do I not have to scroll up in order to get to the comments.
And, again, this has happened to me on four different computers, two personal, one at my job and one at my former school.
What I think a lot of people have forgotten is that its the human, and their browsers responsibility to adjust and control the rendering, not the source of the material.
So if I want to use (or have) a wide screen, I get wide text... If I want to use (or have) a small, or narrow screen, I get narrow text.
These web sites that limit/restrict their renderings to a fixed window size have never bothered to learn the first rule of web pages design. I've seen too many sites these days that restrict their rendering, so that even if I have a wide window (and maybe large fonts), they restrict the rendering to a fraction of the window on the left hand side, and force everything to be wrapped into a worthless and irritating mess!
Yet the user decide!
Don't force fixed formats onto anyone!
Hey, good point!! There can be like a little icon in the corner. One CSS property adjusted by javascript and the whole thing can be adjusted between fixed width and free!
Why don't you use elastic width, keeping the width variable between a set minimum and maximum?
mmm... whilst I don't quite have the luxurious 2600h resolution, I am on a 24" 16:10 and it is terribly small as it is...
Is there any other way to make it more variable, 2 articles beside each other maybe..?
I thought this post could answer the question once and for all, but then I realized that engadget readers don't necessarily represent the 'average' web user.
One thing I'd like to say though, please stop using the phrase 'after the break' in so many posts. It's not that it sucks but it's repetitive. Do a search for "after the break" on google (with the quotes). The third result from the top is engadget.
I get most of my posts from the gmail rss feed. When I link to the page, the 'after the break' makes absolutely no sense.
I'd suggest a link at the bottom of the post like an excerpt, to the effect of 'click here to continue reading and an exclusive picture of a macbook air with two F10 keys'
Otherwise, I'll wait until I get my dual 13" screen laptop to tell you what engadget looks like at 1536*1024