Design
More About The Site Specification
1st April 2007
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Monitors and Browsers
Monitor sizes are changing. All the time. They get bigger. And they get smaller.
Larger computer monitors set at high resolution can mean that the web site with a fixed viewing width is lost on a large screen. But then many large screen owners don't use the internet with the browser at a full-screen setting...
Plus, more and more devices are coming along that can access the internet with smaller and smaller screens. A fixed width web site may mean that the visitor has to scroll horizontally to see some of the content.
Browsers are also changing their capability and what was once impossible on older browsers is now common place on the more modern versions around today.
The common factor in all this is that things change and will keep changing. This has implications for our web site.
To cope with continuing change, we need to stick to the recommended standards of web design as set out by W3C (more on this later). We should stick with design conventions that have been established and use the best practice to make our site accessible to a wide audience.
A full width "liquid" layout is out as that may lead to very long lines of text on a screen. A fixed width is also out for the reasons already noted. That leaves us with an "elastic" layout, one that stretches and compresses within the available space but with limits.
Our elastic site should also be available to older browsers, within reason, and the content accessible to as large an audience as possible without making things too complicated.
Essentially, we want a simple, clean site which "degrades" well if viewed in older browsers and is flexible enough to cope with a wide range of monitor sizes.
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