Fully fluid web design
April 9, 2009Ethan Marcotte has written a terrific article — Fluid Grid – for A List Apart, where he clearly explains how to break out of the ‘little white lie of minimum screen resolution’.
He shows us how to use ems for scalable (fluid) text sizes (I knew that bit) and then how to extrapolate that into calculating percentage widths for a completely fluid web layout. He explains the technique simply and gives some nice clear examples, so there should be no excuse for table-based or fixed pixel width layouts again!
Update 30 April 2009: A criticism levelled at Ethan’s article at A List Apart was that it didn’t deal with fixed width elements inside the container, such as images. So he experimented and came up with a ‘fluid image’ solution too! Very clever. Details of his fluid image solution are here:
http://unstoppablerobotninja.com/entry/fluid-images/
[Links last checked April 2009]
