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From: Robert Treat <[email protected]>
To: Joshua D. Drake <[email protected]>
Cc: Josh Berkus <[email protected]>
Cc: PostgreSQL www <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: "Stretchy" vs. Fixed-width
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2004 15:58:44 -0500
Message-ID: <[email protected]> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
References: <[email protected]>
	<[email protected]>
	<[email protected]>

On Monday 22 November 2004 13:03, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> >>Ahh your second point is still very much an opinion. It doesn't
> >>matter how much you state it as a fact, it is still an opinion.
> >
> >Can we kill this now?    We're none of us so rich in free time that flames
> > are necessary.
>
> Ahhh I haven't see one flame in this thread??? I don't believe that
> Robert would have considered that a flame (at least I hope not).
>

Not a flame, just an uneducated response :-)  For a long while people argued 
the world was flat even after Magellan made his way back around, but for the 
people who had studied it, the jury was out and we knew it was round. 

Now, I'm willing to concede that there are some places where fixed width can 
be used without sacrificing usability, like a kiosk system or possibly on a 
small company intranet where you have a single browser mandate, and the 
computers involved are all uniform, however an internationalized web site of 
an open source project certainly doesn't fall into that category.  

> >>From what I can tell, Fixed-width vs. Variable-width is a *tradeoff*, and
> >> you
> >
> >gain and lose things either way.    Let me sum up the pros for each:
> >
> >Fixed-Width
> > -- Supports more polished designs
> > -- More "corporate"
> > -- supports better visual organization of navigation
> > -- better for websites with many images
> > -- cuts down on scrolling
> > -- emphasizes design
> >

i don't believe it leads to more polished design.  actually just the opposite, 
since a good variable width design is what really looks slick imo, probably 
because it is hard to do.

i dont see how it supports better visual organization of navigation either. 
actually i would tend to think it is worse, since your more likely to 
introduce issues with horizontal scrolling or wasted/unused browser space 
with fixed width.   

> >Variable-Width
> > -- Supports a greater variety of browser/language settings
> > -- More "open source"
> > -- better for large quantities of text content
> > -- emphasizes content
> >
> >Do people agree with the above points?
>

Let me add a few pluses for variable width:
-- allows users to resize text as needed
-- promotes better scanability of site content  

-- 
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL

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