Comments on: Elastic Layouts Dead?

By: Evan Skuthorpe

Evan Skuthorpe — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 09:23:31 +0000

Ivan – that’s precisely what I’m talking about. Regardless of what res I’m looking at a site in, it should be consistent. An elastic site is not ideal as if a customer is looking at 1920×1200 the site blows out hugely.

By: Ivan

Ivan — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 01:28:01 +0000

@Evan: I’ve just looked at play.com and I don’t see the awfulness you speak of. Although I tried it at 1280×1800, I can see that the main content area expands and shrinks nicely. But why would you go with full screen at such a high resolution anyway? I don’t any websites which might look good at 1920×1200, unless they were specifically designed for that resolution. But even that wouldn’t work unless the user always maximised their browser, which can’t be relied upon.

By: Mike - Elegance in Design

Mike - Elegance in Design — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 17:39:47 +0000

The issue is, even when supported and not hidden by the web browsers, you can be sure Microsoft is going to implement it poorly. It’s their status quo. So still there is the need to maintain control with your own elastic code as it were.

By: Evan Skuthorpe

Evan Skuthorpe — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:08:43 +0000

I’ve never been a fan of elastic layouts, just look at play.com on 1920×1200 at full screen. F*@%ing awful.

By: Sanish

Sanish — Fri, 02 May 2008 17:01:00 +0000

It is often subjected to a matter of change. With the upgraded browsers being let out quite often these days!

By: Jason Marsh

Jason Marsh — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:54:35 +0000

Very interesting topic, it’s hard to tell. Browser keep changing and so will the way we design for them.

By: Anthony

Anthony — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 00:00:18 +0000

@Ms Mouse: Sounds like your talking about conditional comments for IE, and yes it would be nice without them! Sounds like this rant is from personal experience I thankfully have not come across logging in in that way, I feel for you.

By: Ms Mouse

Ms Mouse — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 23:43:39 +0000

The missing bit in the post above is CTL+ALT+DEL, ie.

“What would be even better in terms of accessibility would be doing away with the stark, staring madness of features like having to select CTL+ALT+DEL in order to log in!”

(Hope those characters don’t get eaten up and disappear this time).

By: Ms Mouse

Ms Mouse — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 23:39:52 +0000

I used to love Opera but got so fed up with bumping in to sites that demanded IE that I switched to Firefox, because there are Firefox extensions that allow you to trick websites into thinking that you are using IE if they demand IE.

I have looked at IE7 and it is way better than IE6 but still not a patch on Firefox or Opera.

Please excuse my non-technical language, and slippery grasp on issues to do with browser compatibility, but … what would be really good would be a browser that had all the whizzo features of the likes of Firefox, Opera etc. and could also automatically detect bits of code that, as I understand it, have to be written in non-standard ways to accommodate IE and automatically adjust for them.

What would be even better in terms of accessibility would be doing away with the stark, staring madness of features like having to select in order to log in! IT professionals have explained to me, in all seriousness, with that special patronising tone that IT professionals adopt in when talking to mere users, that this is an “important security feature”. Well yes, of course it is, if your biggest security threat is some sort of evil genius who happens to have only one hand or a significant upper limb impairment (fer chrisssake!!!)

As an evil genius with a significant upper limb impairment, I naturally find the thoughtless provision of this “security feature” and its mindless activation by corporate IT professionals … extremely irritating.

By: Anthony

Anthony — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 22:55:09 +0000

Thanks for the comments,

@Vinny, Good points, but elastic design does have its uses, in trying to make the website layout accessible as possible by using a relative measurment type, rather than fixed, the content area cross platform should be the width of the screen no matter what res your screen runs at. You are also quite right there is no doubt that elastic designs are what I called “bragging rights” for web designers. Thanks for feedback.

@Florian, a good argument and it does seem a styleswitcher or theme switch is the way forward, the best answer to this would be a detection script that can pick a stylesheet upon what res the user is on. I have moved off topic conversation to a more appropriate place Thanks for feedback.

@Mozilla, I back Vinny, add a Zoom!