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                             Liquid layout problems
                                        
Mark [1] called this evening with a few questions about webservers. He's
having to write one for a project he's working on at work (to basically
stream MP3s to a software component they don't have the source code to and it
wants to talk to a webserver before it'll play an MP3).

Talk then shifted to the journal and the new layout I'm working on. Okay, so
I'm following the Upgrade Campaign [2] Jeffrey Zeldman [3] is spearheading
and I've done my part, using HTML (HyperText Markup Language) 4.01 strict and
CCS (Cascading Style Sheets) (importing it on the sly [4] so Netscape 4x
doesn't crash). But Mark runs Windows NT at 640x480 (yes, he really does.
Surprised me when he first mentioned it) and the page isn't laying out as
intented—two columns side by side. Instead the right side is slipping down
below the left, giving it a somewhat weird look. Spring [5] reported the same
thing. I made the font smaller (in fact, I specified it, whereas before I
didn't) but Mark was still having problems with layout and expressed dismay
that it did that.

I told him that was the result of using a liquid layout, but he asked if
there was anything that could be done to stop that. Funny, coming from a guy
who isn't a web designer and usually could care less how a site looks. At
least the site is readable, if a bit funky at low resolutions.

He then mentioned that it should be possible to get the screen size of the
client browser, but I'm not aware of anything the browser sends to the server
that would allow me to determine that. Mark assured me that it was possible,
but in the years I've been doing web programming (okay, mostly backend stuff
with little reguard to the visual display of pages) I haven't heard of that
at all.

[1] http://www.conman.org/people/myg/
[2] http://www.webstandards.org/upgrade/what.html
[3] http://www.zeldman.com/
[4] http://www.alistapart.com/stories/journey/5.html
[5] http://www.springdew.com/

Email author at sean@conman.org

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