Re: Web Page Keyholes

At 01:56 PM 8/25/2005, Hendrik Schober wrote:
>Scott Meyers <smeyers-Q9ZaqOuDrMJWk0Htik3J/[email protected]> wrote:
>> [...] Fixed-width web pages are easy to avoid.  [...]
>
>  You know, I thought that, too. However, someone
>  whom I trust explained to me that it is really 
>  hard to come up with a design that fulfills all 
>  the customer's requirements /and/ adapts to any 
>  size. In the end, customers often won't pay for 
>  the effort. 

I'm sure that there are some customers who will not, and I'm sure that it
is possible to come up with a set of constraints such that doing it would
be terribly difficult (especially for *any* size, cell phone and PDA to
1600x1200 or more), but too many sites targetting "normal"people do it for
this to be a compelling argument.  Examples: Amazon, Slashdot, Shoutcast,
and Videoflicks.  And, as I note in my draft chapter on the topic, many --
most? -- web UI sites determined line lengths dynamically.

This is a solved problem.  It is not hard to come up with good designs that
determine line breaks dynamically (at least for non-handheld monitors), and
such designs are not hard to implement.  There are lots of examples of how
to do it.  All it takes is the will.

Scott