Thursday, February 22, 2001
Liquid layout problems
Mark 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 Jeffrey Zeldman is spearheading and I've done my part, using HTML 4.01 strict and CCS (importing it on the sly 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 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.
