new layout on wiki4d

[Stewart Gordon]

Adam Ruppe wrote:
> On 6/4/10, Stewart Gordon <smjg_1998 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> See also this discussion I was once involved in:
>> http://tinyurl.com/3ysen6d
>> and in particular Alan J. Flavell's comment (number 12 in the tree).
> 
> This thread reminds me of another "bug" report I got a few months ago:
> "please use 980px fixed width, not fluid layout". Yeah, I did the
> fluid layout (which is the easier way to do it anyway!), which looks
> exactly like what they want on 980, AND scales up and down, and they
> insist that it be changed anyway.

Do you ever manage to get reasons (or even excuses) out of your clients 
for their ridiculous requests?

That said....

One excuse I've heard for fixed-width layout is that very wide layouts 
are less comfortable to read.  But if that's the case, they can resize 
their browsers!  Like what I said about font sizes, people set their 
browsers to a width that is comfortable for them.

Others claim that some layouts just can't be made fluid.  But that's 
still no reason for a client to insist on it.  And I suspect that in the 
majority of cases the claim is due to the limit of the coder's skill, an 
attempt at making the design too complicated or some linear combination 
of the two.

But those who feel they must set a width can at least
* specify it in ems or some other relative unit
* set it as a max-width, so that nobody has to scroll horizontally as a 
result.

> Another ridiculous one was when the insisted on using html image maps
> for text yuck!), so the link's font matches exactly. Thankfully, he
> backed off that one.

Yes, people who gratuitously do text as images are another silly thing. 
  But really puzzlingly, some people can't for their lives set 
appropriate alt attributes even on such images as these.

Text links can actually look better these days, now that we have 
ClearType.  And now that we have CSS, there's plenty of room for their 
links to be customised.  When I took over
http://www.lrca.org.uk/
among the many improvements I made was to replace the image links in 
navigation columns with text links.  The backgrounds of these links are 
the same as they were.  This killed a few birds with one stone:
- looks nicer, at least with ClearType enabled
- zooms well
- don't have to create a new image every time I want to link to 
something new
- don't have to fiddle around with relative image links

FWIW I've just been reminded of this:
http://webtips.dan.info/wysiwyg.html#HallOfShame
(the entry is out of date with respect to the particular site, but 
still....)

Stewart.