Are fluid websites worth making anymore? [closed]

Answer 1

Absolutely. It is a big inconvenience to people with huge monitors to have to resize the page. It can also be a bit dodgy with some layouts. Little inconveniences, no matter how trivial, can actually affect people's opinions of your site.

Also, netbooks have odd resolutions which make it hard to design sites for. For example, I'm writing this at 1024x600.

It's not particularly hard nowadays either (in modern browsers), especially with min- and max-height in CSS, and the new gradients, etc in CSS3, so image scaling won't be as big a problem in the near future.

In response to the comment below, I think that the pros outweigh the cons in this particular case - IE6 is a problem everywhere. We just have to deal with it.

Answer 2

Yes. Page zooming is great but it is primarily used to make text bigger, not to make text fill the viewport. Certainly if the body text is already too wide, zooming down to make it fit will usually make it unreadable.

You need liquid layout if you're going to make the text fit the viewport whether or not it's zoomed.

The point about ‘long lines being hard to read’ is often overstated by designers trying to justify fixed width designs(*), but in reality it doesn't seem to hold quite as strongly on-screen as it did on paper. Of course setting a good leading/line-height is important, and max-width can be used to inhibit the worst excesses of long lines. (Set it in font-relative em units.) You don't get max-width in IE6, but that's not the disaster it once was. (You can fix it with a little bit of JavaScript if you really care about those guys. I don't.)

(* which are indeed less work for highly graphical layouts. But for a simpler layout like, er, StackOverflow's, there isn't really any reason not to go liquid. Tsk @SO, eh!)