Ed Mullen wrote:
Daniel Barclay wrote:
Ed Mullen wrote:
...
And, by the way, it's not just purists or hobbyists who design to be
compliant with the W3C recommended standards:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A//www.ibm.com/us/en/
Unfortunately, IBM doesn't seem to understand how/why to avoid making
fixed-width web pages...
Daniel
How does it not work in some spedified browser?
Actually, it's not an issue of browser (software) differences, but
of usage differences.
The way it doesn't work is that users have to scroll back and forth
horizontally to see the content more often than they would have to if
the pages didn't set fixed widths and did let the browser exercise
its normal feature of adjusting the page's layout to try to fit the
user's chosen browser window width.
(And when the width of a text column is fixed at some width wider
than the user's chosen browser window width, then the user has to
scroll back and forth horizontally once for _each_ line of text to
read it.)
Yes, you won't notice that if you simply use one full-screen browser
window on a relatively large screen.
However, if instead you want to use your screen space to see two or
three windows you can see at the same time (say, a browser window to
read some page, and then an editor window to take notes or an e-mail
window to comment about the page), you'll notice the problem.
Consider that IBM page at http://www.ibm.com/us/en/ (at least how it's
formatted right now).
The set of tabs and their nested links don't shrink and stretch
(horizontally) when you change the width of the browser window.
So even though their content (that amount of text) could fit in a
fairly narrow window, it doesn't, and so you'd have to scroll
horizontally more than you'd otherwise have to.
(It seems that IBM set a fixed width somewhere. A similar problem
is tying the width of text columns to fixed-width items such as big
images. Even if some fixed-size content (e.g., a big image) is too
wide to be seen in the user's browser window scrolling, the user
shouldn't have to scroll around horizontally to see the content
that isn't inherently of a fixed size.)
Daniel
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