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Re: Scalable design or fixed

for

From: Chris Heilmann
Date: Oct 4, 2004 9:58AM


>
> Hi,
>
> Making websites accessible is new territory for my company, and has
> brought up
> many issues which people are passionate about. One of them is weather we
> should have a design of fixed width rather than a scaleable one. Log file
> analyses indicates that most of our users have a 1024 x 768 screen
> resolution
> and many people favor building for this resolution. My questions are:
>
> Is it ok to do this and be DDA complaint? (I couldn't find anywhere that
> said it couldn't be fixed, but did see plenty of information on making
> elements
> of a page scaleable-fonts etc)

Yes, albeit scaling designs are, by definition, more flexible and easier
to use. This is a endless discussion and has been debated to bits [1][2].
It is more a usability issue than an accessibility one. Liquid designs can
become too wide to be readable without losing the context (which can be
fixed by resizing the browser window) whereas fixed designs can force
people to scroll horizontally. It is up to you to decide, or you can give
the user a choice: http://ltlg.icant.co.uk/

> Are log file data on screen resolution reliable?

No, they only can get this data via Javascript, what about the users that
don't have JS enabled?

HTH
Chris


[1]http://9rules.com/whitespace/design/liquid_vs_fixed.php
[2]
http://www.stopdesign.com/log/2003/12/15/fixedorliquid.html


--
Chris Heilmann
http://icant.co.uk/ | http://www.onlinetools.org/