A bitter conflict has been raging for years, and it splits web designers right down the middle. It's a bit like 'The War Of The Roses', but without the blood. Let me explain.
The average web designer is a control freak. If he has gone to the trouble of designing a beautiful website, he wants it to look exactly the same for every visitor, even though they are using different web browsers and some have bigger screens than others. Only by setting the width of the page precisely, and nailing down every last pixel, will perfection be achieved. This is the 'fixed' mentality (see anally retentive).
This pixel-perfect website will look mouth-watering for anyone using the same screen resolution as the web designer, but what about the deviants who reduce their screen resolution to 800x600 rather than go to Specsavers, or those who think a 2048x1536 monitor is a sign of virility? The former will view the website with their mouse permanently hovering over the horizontal scroll bar, while the latter are left wondering why the gaps at the sides of the page are five times bigger than the page itself.
Perhaps the worst affected are laptop users with relatively wide, but short screens. They may have big gaps at the sides of the page, but still have to scroll up and down to view all the content.
And here's the real dilemma for the fixed-width army - if you are going to fix the page width, how wide do you make it? Which set of visitors do you want to annoy the most?
So what's the answer? (enter Henry Tudor on his white charger, stage left).
The alternative is not to define the page width in pixels, but as percentage of available width, and to allow the content to flow within the page. This is the 'fluid' approach - no big gaps and no horizontal scrolling.
So why aren't all pages fluid? Well, in truth, it's more difficult to test your website at a variety of widths than it is to just fix it to one. Crazy things can happen if your browser window is really narrow. Your content can end up with all the bits stacked up on top of each other, like a game of Tetris that went badly wrong. On the other hand, if you allow an area of text to get too wide your visitors may have to stick their finger on the screen so as not to lose their place. It's a pain, and the web designer has to allow for it.
The thing that fired me off on this blog was Blogger itself. Google generally use a fluid layout. If you do a Google search for images, they will spread out to fill the screen. But at the time of writing Blogger only allows fixed width layouts, 500-1000 pixels, leaving you with the choice of how best to please your followers.
Not an issue for me, I don't have any followers, but I still care.
