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The Width and Resolution Problem
There is a problem that has plagued the web ever since graphical
designs for web pages started to become common - and yet it's a
problem that's never been solved. You see, different sized
monitors can handle different widths of page, and yet HTML
doesn't really let you take width into consideration when you're
designing.
There are two general width and height style properties that can
be used to size any page element. The width property gives the
width of an element in pixels or as a percentage of the page
width. The height property sets its height in pixels or as a
percentage of page height. Why is this such a problem? Well, let
me explain.
What is Resolution?
Before we can get to the problem, you need to know what a screen
resolution is. To put it simply, your resolution is the number
of pixels that can be displayed across your monitor,
horizontally and vertically. For example, at 640x480 resolution
(the lowest anyone still uses), your screen is 640 pixels wide
by 480 pixels high.
Most monitors can handle more than one resolution, and will give
you a choice between them. Typically, there will be a lower
resolution that fits less pixels on the screen but makes them
look bigger, and a higher one that fits more but makes
everything look small. The default is usually somewhere in the
middle.
To check the resolution you're using now, right click on your
desktop and choose Properties. Now go to the Settings tab and
look at the screen resolution section. On most computers, there
will be up to four settings to choose from: 640x480, 800x600,
1024x768 and 1280x1024. It's worth changing your resolution a
few times and going to some web pages, to get an idea of how
much width each setting gives you.
Now, you have to realise that the maximum width of your website,
in pixels, will be the lowest width you expect your site's
visitors to be using. In almost all cases, this is 800x600: the
640x480 users are now a small enough minority to mostly ignore,
as they'll be used to sites displaying incorrectly. At 800x600
and up, though, you should test your site to make sure it looks
good.
The Price of Failure.
If you don't test your site correctly, then various things will
go wrong. At resolutions lower than the
one you designed the
site for, visitors may see horizontal scrollbars. If you fix the
site's width too low, though, visitors using higher resolutions
may just see a thin strip of your website in the middle of their
screen.
Possible Solutions.
The most popular solution to the resolution problem is to just
design as if everyone was using 800x600 - after all, people with
big monitors can just make their browser windows smaller. To
make a fixed width design, simply set the CSS width of your body
tag to the width you want in pixels (so for 800x600, width:
800px). If you take this approach, you will probably want to set
the CSS margins to auto, as this will put your fixed-width page
in the centre of larger screens - if you leave the margins
alone, then your page will appear on the far left of the web
browser at high resolutions, which is common to see but still
looks bad.
Of course, the more complicated but better way of doing things
is to make sure that your design will work just as well no
matter how wide the browser is, because it stretches to fit.
These kinds of designs are known as 'elastic'. This can be
difficult, but it's doable, especially for relatively simple
designs. If your design has three columns, for example, you can
make the left and right columns fixed-width but leave the middle
column to take up all the remaining width.
The biggest concern with elastic designs tends to be the
graphics: if you have a fixed-width header, how can you adjust
your site for any possible width? In most cases, the solution is
to make your header an image that floats over a background
continuing it. For example, you might use an image of navigation
text floating over a line - you can then continue that line as
the background image, to avoid it suddenly appearing to stop if
the viewer's resolution is wider than your navigation images.
CSS gives you a lot of power to create illusions like this: make
good use of it.
About the author:
Original Source: Articles-Galore.com
Information supplied and written by Lee Asher of Eclipse Domain
Services
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