I understand the high content issue, but I can think of two interesting
examples to illustrate what I think is a fairly serious design issue on the
drupal.org site.
One is Yahoo - fairly high content ;-)site - neither the old or the new
design allows page elements to literally slide over top of each other. The
new yahoo design allows for use of the entire window size better than the
old one, but the headers don't 'squeeze' past a certain point if you reduce
the size of the browser window. Yahoo is an interesting site to look at in
general because of the high content, traffic, and the money they spend on
usability and human factors in interface design. I'm not sure where they are
going with their new design but interestingly enough it more closely
resembles Open Source CMS's than the old design.
Second is the Foxfire site, which is clearly a major influence on the
Bluebeach theme. Again if you resize the browser window there is some
'sliding' of elements but not past a specific point and the navigation tabs
don't become 'unglued' and stack up over each other as they do with the
drupal.org site if you 'squeeze' it past a certain point.
Hopefully Chris' suggestions will help with text resizing if it is a
critical issue. I think it is less of an issue than the mangling that takes
place with browser window resizing now.
I just want to encourage you to consider setting a minimum size point past
which the elements do not slide over/under each other or start 'stacking'
above or below each other.
Kent
-----Original Message-----
From: drupal-support-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:drupal-support-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Chris Johnson
Sent: Thursday, November 11, 2004 8:57 AM
To: drupal-support@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [drupal-support] sliders (was drupal.org s l o w)
Steven Wittens wrote:
> By the way, an important aspect that you lose with fixed-width design
> is text resizing. If the line length is optimal at 100% text size,
> it's probably too cramped at 120% or 150%.
>
> Steven Wittens
No, that's not quite true. My employer's web sites are designed with fixed
minimum and maximum widths, but also allow text resizing under Gecko and
MSIE (and probably others). There are a couple of tricks to doing this,
since MSIE doesn't follow the rules, but it can be done or well
approximated. Here are some of the basics I've come across that are needed
in the CSS and (X)HTML:
html, body {
font-size: 90%; /* need to use percentage here so that ems will work later
with MSIE */
text-align: center; /* to center container in IE5.x because it does not
handle margin: 0 auto; I suppose it can be left out if design need not be
centered in a maximized window larger than max width of design */ }
h1, h2 {
/* example -- all remaining text item sizes must be in ems for text resize
*/
font-size: 1em;
}
#container {
/* this div is used to center page and has a max width set in ems */
width: 45em;
text-align: left; /* resets real text alignment after the kludge used
above to center the page for MSIE */
margin: 0 auto; /* centers the container in CSS compliant browsers */ }
#content {
/* example column div allows some fluid design but limits min and max
widths in ems*/
min-width: 20em;
max-width: 30em;
/* MSIE's inability to do real text resize and lack of CSS compliance
forces us to do the following kludge: */
width: expression(document.body.clientWidth > (500/12) *
parseInt(document.body.currentStyle.fontSize) ? "30em" : "auto");
padding: 1em;
margin-left: 16em;
}
--
Chris Johnson
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