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RickP
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Liquid or Ice? - 9/26/2005 15:43:10
Just wondering what are people's thoughts about the pros and cons of liquid or ice design?
Is one better than the other for various things in your opinion - e.g.
Appearance?
Useability / Accessibility?
Ease of design?
Do you think the future of 'ice design' is to cater for a minimum width of 1024px as opposed to 800px monitors?
What do you think is best and why?
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dpf
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RE: Liquid or Ice? - 9/26/2005 15:44:55
quote:
pros and cons of liquid or ice design huh??????
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RE: Liquid or Ice? - 9/26/2005 15:59:03
liquid - e.g. 100% of viewport vs ice (fixed e.g. 760 px)
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RE: Liquid or Ice? - 9/26/2005 16:42:12
though it takes a bit more to sort headers and the like i.e. so it fits into what you think of as 'minumum' resolution e.g. 760px wide or less but i agree that liquid while ebing a bit harder to design certainly 'fits' better in a lot of cases
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RE: Liquid or Ice? - 9/26/2005 16:50:16
quote:
Do you think the future of 'ice design' is to cater for a minimum width of 1024px as opposed to 800px monitors? that day will come
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Nicole
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RE: Liquid or Ice? - 9/26/2005 16:56:26
Using a 17" screen with a resolution of 1280x1024, it frustrates me at times when looking at sites that looked nice at 1024x768, but now look way too skinny and way too short. But what can you do?
25% of people still use 800x600 and that's obviously worth catering for, indeed if current trends continue it will still take at least 3 years before that figure drops to 10%, which is also still worth catering for, and who knows how long it'll take before 800x600 has less than 1% popularity.
I know my screen res settings are still in the minority, that's why I still capture ant screenshots at 1024x768, and always keep an eye on my sites at those 3 screen res's.
But I agree with Dave, it's mostly when you have a banner image or navigation menu buttons that you mostly set a fixed width, most other sites and templates i've done stretch to 100% but are usually still designed with 1024x768 in mind and content may begin to stretch unevenly down the page at 800x600.
Nicole
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RE: Liquid or Ice? - 9/26/2005 17:02:11
quote:
drops to 10%, which is also still worth catering for, at some point, they have to face the fact they have an "old" monitor. it isnt like accessibility where the issue is CAN someone see it - its a convenience issue. I used to get frustrated at work when they made restrictive rules to corral the 10% bad employees and the 90% good had to suffer. I dont think I will cater to a 10% with old monitors and diminish the experience of 90% with newer. As Nicole points out, even the growing # of 1280 gets less than their moneys worth with a 1024 res.
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RE: Liquid or Ice? - 9/26/2005 17:03:05
I may start now...lol
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RE: Liquid or Ice? - 9/26/2005 17:14:05
Currently it's a matter of personal taste.
Liquid designs are in theory "better" but they're hard to pull off well without having too long a line length etc. at wider screen resolutions which is a real no-no.
My current pet idea is to get max-width/min-width working properly (ooh guess which browser doesn't recognise these properly?) - which you can do with CSS for good browsers and a crowbar for IE. This has some major downsides if JS is switched off - still thinking it through though so haven't come to any sensible conclusion.
I quite like the Jello layout - halfway between fixed and liquid - haven't had a chance to implement it yet.
Man in Blue offers two stylesheets - a narrow 800px box and a wider version - also interesting.
I'm rambling aren't I? My conclusion is that liquid would be best - but it's really hard to do well. Fixed is easier to get right for most people. If you can work with expandability within that fixed box then that's where I'd start and then figure out the other stuff later!
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RE: Liquid or Ice? - 9/26/2005 17:39:45
quote:
I vote liquid. you mean vodka
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RickP
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RE: Liquid or Ice? - 9/26/2005 18:43:10
Thanks Nicole - I believe I have looked at these stats before.
I'm gonna have to get into all the FF extras for development - are they genuinely useful? Where do I start? (I already have FF for checks but that is all I use it for.)
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RE: Liquid or Ice? - 9/26/2005 18:46:40
quote:
ORIGINAL: dpf
quote:
I vote liquid. you mean vodka
That as well, but as I usually find that as IE treats width as min-width anyway the liquid designs work OK. I have a res of 1280, but often use the Fx resize thingy, so am I confusing someone's stats here?
< Message edited by caz -- 9/26/2005 21:01:36 >
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RE: Liquid or Ice? - 9/27/2005 0:00:03
also remember that at 1280 users are (possibly) even more likely to make use of that screen real estate and have their browser at say 900px wide or have their bookmarks open...
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RE: Liquid or Ice? - 9/27/2005 2:24:10
quote:
ORIGINAL: RickP
Thanks Nicole - I believe I have looked at these stats before.
I'm gonna have to get into all the FF extras for development - are they genuinely useful? Where do I start? (I already have FF for checks but that is all I use it for.)
I'd use FF for everyday browsing - tabbed browsing is much more convenient.
If you only get one extension make sure it's the web developer one.
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RE: Liquid or Ice? - 9/27/2005 5:59:20
Thanks for the pointers on FX (is that the standard abbr?).
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smcfarland
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RE: Liquid or Ice? - 9/27/2005 7:14:11
As to original question, it depends on the website. It seems there is still a large percentage running an 800px screen.
For ecommerce, I do ice. I would rather have complete control and know what the website will look like regardless of the resolution. If I design a liquid ecommerce site, I will have to navigate the entire site at various resolutions to be sure there are no errors, etc. and that the website will evoke security enough to have orders.
For informational websites, I think it best to do liquid. If there is a lot of content, then it will eliminate scrolling through a majority.
The middle ground is to use a % -- I like 90% of screen, centered.
That's my opinion/basis.
Also, for a pre-existing site, I also think it best to check their stats. A baby-related website will usually get larger resolutions (due to younger audiences) than say an insurance website for long term care (usually the 50+ crowd). It is all about making your audience comfortable, not the majority of internet users as a whole.
< Message edited by smcfarland -- 9/27/2005 8:52:53 >
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RE: Liquid or Ice? - 9/27/2005 8:38:40
Most of my stuff is either ice or (as someone coined earlier) Jello.
IMO, when it comes to database-content sites, having the data in an organized, neat structure is essential to useability. There is a very good arguement right there to use a fixed-width systems.
So I guess my point about this (as well as most other design considerations) is to let the content dictate the layout and flow and not any set 'standard' or whatever the trend is today.
If folks are confused with your site, even if it is 'compliant' with current theorys and tools, it is still useless.
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dpf
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RE: Liquid or Ice? - 9/27/2005 8:45:35
I prefer liquid (vodka) with ice.
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RE: Liquid or Ice? - 9/27/2005 10:58:39
I personally tend to use ice layouts for most everything. If you want to use a lot of graphics in the header and/or navigation, having the content area resized can be a real hassle as I'm sure you're all well aware.
I tend to use the statistics of who is using what resolution in a slightly different manner. In most cases, people (like myself) are designing with 800x600 a minimum while still looking quite good in 1024x768, although I'd prefer if it were the other way around. Anyway, anyone using a different resolution will already be accustomed to how standard sites will look in their browser, so I think ice layouts are just fine. If you really want to make it look good in all resolutions, there is always the option of checking the resolution and dynamically choosing a stylesheet or template based on that, but I've never found that to be a time-efficient endeavor (plus, it's not foolproof anyway).
I think if IE ever gets truly good CSS support, liquid layouts may be a little easier to do. In order to achieve "the holy grail" of all layouts, the Pure CSS Liquid Layout, you often employ a lot of floating divs, which can be a nightmare. You generally have to hack the stylesheets for browser compatibility, as IE and Firefox render padding and margins quite a bit differently, and being off by a few pixels can send a floating div right to the bottom of the page. I've tried a lot with pure CSS liquid layouts, and often resort to throwing it back into a table just to get the site wrapped up and online. On the other hand, I may be a bit biased because I started out with print layout before moving on to Web design, so I've grown accustomed to pixel perfect layout, which at this stage is virtually impossible with a liquid layout.
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Tailslide
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RE: Liquid or Ice? - 9/27/2005 11:23:57
There are thankfully ways round the vast majority of IE failures without resorting to hacks - the box model included.
Pixel Perfect layouts are something that should be restricted to print - websites are fluid - users can change too much for us to retain total control anyway. It is perfectly possible to have very very close to pixel perfect in all modern browsers and then feed NN4 a plain unstyled site.
I'm preaching against type because I tend to use fixed width designs currently too - but the next version of my own site won't be fixed width it will be more flexible (that's not to say full width of the screen) and will expand when the font-size increases so you get an effect similar to Opera's zoom. That's my "big plan" anyway.
I love this site: http://www.gbhxonline.com/ Try increasing the font-size!
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Printable Version 
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On my own site I used a fixed width but set it inside a scaling table so it takes up 50% of the spare screen space. 
