This fluid web design concept is a handsome practical manner to contain dynamically displaying data. Be that menu items, be that news feeds, modules, photos, practically any kind of data. Naturally that a PDF spewed from Adobe InDesign will have to consider the moments when its nicely crafted lorem ipsum paragraphs will grow up into real news, real blog posts, real weather feeds, real whatever... And only this little thought, like a pre-concept, will be enough for the perfect pixel paper designer to realize that menus, side columns and main columns will expand or shrink according to the length of the real life texts or images that are about to... "fluidly" wander stack on top of the yesterday ones there. Every morning.
Yes, every morning that some public serving creative, or non creative, informative, or less informative, cute, or less cute, blog, feed, image, will be served to the content management system. One may compare this with metabolism in a living being. This may also help one understand why a "FIXED WIDTH TO THE PRESCRIBED LIMITS IN THE PDF" will do bad on the future site-to-be. Let not mention that Firefox > View > Text size > Increase [Ctrl++] / Decrease [Ctrl+-] will also ruin the paper bind-mind fixed fits of fonts, background images and dropdown flyouts into the exact width of the page.
A fluid design on a web site should be seen like a smile on a living happy face, as against a frozen spasm.
What clients and mockup designers should accept as a given, the ranting list of three:
1. Fluidity in a web design is not reduced to having a fixed or fluid width of the entire page. One may opt for a fixed width page and this is perfectly fine. The web site will still take advantage of so many fluid inner design constructs, like the menus, the side columns and the main column, to name only the obvious. Because, honestly, who's wanting to have a good site that's looking and acting like a badge?
2. A dynamical dropdown menu is a CSS set of nested lists. Not a hard coded element, nor a pencil drawn rectangle. The lists then are made of menu items, in other words the so-called "links" which are pure contractable/expandable text strings. And even if one would decide: "I'll never ever change the links in my top menu!", there's still the average Joe out there in Kentucky with a legitimate need to oversize fonts at 280% on his screen. Otherwise said: there's a random chance your fixed fitting menu will get screwed on some other screen. Because not all screens are displaying what's up on your screen...
3. Content columns? Well, who's then wanting to own a web site invariantly presenting the same old news, frozen in the forgotten times when you launched that site. Aaand then... when you come in to pile up some more news, or to edit the old ones (yes, I saw people blogging in the place of their old blogs, using the [Edit] button instead of the [New] button for adding news...) then all the splendor of the fixed height (yes, not just widths are subject to the fix force) will crumble in a disparaged inequality of those columns.
This was the "back" for today's morning. Not sure if back tomorrow. Trying not to be that insistent... But one never knows...
Have a nice day!
