Re: Re: posting variables to parent frame

Edward Vermillion wrote:

So you're saying that if I "maximize" my browser window, all the sites that you made with tables will "actually look good", at 1680 x 1050, because they are stretchy-pages? Honestly, I have no clue as to why some folks think that a "stretchy"/ liquid/dynamic layout has anything to do with good design... I have yet to see one that did anyway*... :P On the other hand, if I increase my font size (which I almost always do) I expect the layout to "grow" so that I can actually read what's on the page, without the words all running together. But that's a different thing than being "stretchy". Ed [*] I'm often wrong, but I'm open to different viewpoints if you've got an example to prove me wrong. ;)

Ok, this is attempt #2 since the list rejected the previous attempt. Well one of my biggest pet peeves with absolute-positioned-element pages is if I maximize my window, I still just have a tiny little blob in the centre which has the actual page content, with lines of text still needlessly wrapping around their artificial constraints. Then I see trash like "this site looks best in 1024x768" or something similar. What ever happened to device-independent design? What's next, a trip down memory lane to 1998 when sites had "looks best with Internet Explorer" and "looks best with Netscape" plastered all over them!? I scoffed at anyone who back in the day used to say "most people view web sites at 800x600, so design for that". No. I say design something that's still readable at 640x480, and make it liquid so it will expand to whatever's available up to the point where it no longer needs expansion. At that point, just make sure it's centered. So what I usually do is I put my page content in a rectangular boundary. (sometimes I'll put page headers and footers outside this bounding box, but the main content stays inside.) I then left-justify all the inner content to the box. (English reads left-to-right, so left-justified paragraphs look 10 000 times better centered text.) But if someone expands their window to a huge size, it looks dorky to have _everything_ stuck to the left of the window! So the *bounding box* is what's centered in the window. Everything inside the bounding box is then set with percentage-based widths where "stretchyness" is ok (eg. for blocks of text), or pixel values where it should never change (eg. for images placed on the page). For the percentage-based widths, this is a percentage of the bounding box size. The actual size of the bounding box is nice and liquid, stretching as wide as necessary until there are no more lines of text that need to be wrapped. I think that results in the best page layout, all the way from tiny PDA screens at 160x240 to your 1680x1050 behemoth! :-) If there's an elegant way of doing this with CSS, let me know. But I've found this usually works well for a simple site layout that has headers and footers as wide as the window, and a menu down the left made with 120px wide graphics. <?php echo "Here's some PHP code so this list doesn't consider my post O.T."; ?> <body> <!-- Headers go here --> <center><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0"><tr valign="top" align="left"><td><!-- bounding box start --> <table>

    <tr>
       <td width="120">
          <!-- Menu column made with 120px wide graphics goes here -->
       </td>
       <td width="*">
          <!-- Liquid / stretchy text and other page content goes here -->
       </td>
    </tr>

</table> </td></tr></table></center><!-- bounding box end --> <!-- Footers go here --> </body> The coments commented as "Liquid / stretchy text..." can then have divs completely dynamic tables and whatever, which are all scaled to whatever size that particular table cell (with width="*") happens to end up being rendered at.