Re: Fixed-width web pages - have some pity on designers!

At 10:37 AM 8/6/2003, Jill Huchital wrote:
>Many web page designers come from a graphic design
>background. They mostly learned to design magazine
>pages, brochures, etc., where they don't plan for
>someone resizing their work. They know how to make
>things look prominent, how to show that two items
>relate, etc., assuming that nobody doinks around with
>the page layout. So now your chapter points out that
>people want to resize the "content window", which
>necessarily doinks with the layout. The "solutions"
>part of the chapter would be stronger if it
>specifically called out how to solve the content
>coherence problems in a variable-width window that
>don't come up with a fixed-width window.

This suggestion made no sense to me when I first read it.  Let's suppose
you want to say "this text should be centered right below this graphic."
You can say that exactly the same way in both a fixed-width and
variable-width layout: you put the image into a centered table cell (of
variable width) and you put the text into the (centered) cell below it.
I'm assuming that readers will have at least that much knowledge of HTML,
or at least HTML capabilities.  Heck, I do, and I'm hardly an HTML guy.

But this brings up something I'd originally planned to include in the
chapter but finally decided not to.  Most people who do page layout almost
certainly use tools like FrontPage or DreamWeaver to do their design work.
I've never used such tools, but I'm assuming that they shield most users
from raw HTML most of the time.  But that means that a possible reason why
people create fixed-width pages(*) is that their tools do it by default or
they make varying-width pages harder to create or all their samples and
documentation show only fixed-width pages(*), etc.  In other words, people
may be choosing fixed-width(*) layouts simply because their tools channel
them into doing it.  I'd very much appreciate it if people who work with
these tools can let me know whether this is the case.  If so, I'll want to
address it explicitly.

Scott

(*) I've since realized that the problem isn't fixed-width layouts, it's
maximum-width layouts.  IME, most maximum-width sites are fixed in width,
but mindview.net has the interesting characteristic of being variable-width
that tops out at 765 pixels.  I find this very strange, but I've been
exchanging email with the site designer, and let's just say that he and I
have very different views of how web pages should be designed.  Anyway,
does anybody know of other sites with a varying-but-fixed-maximum-width
designs?