[pmwiki-users] Disjointed Display

Hans design at flutesong.net
Thu Feb 10 03:29:23 CST 2005


Thursday, February 10, 2005, 6:59:38 AM, Wade wrote:
> My webmaster believes that "this suggestion would disable the auto
> resizing, which is the wrong way to go...."

Your webmaster believes wrong. Let him try it outand see the truth for
himself. My suggestions were quite normal webdesign practise.

If you have a right and a left side, and the right is define as 75%
width, and the left as 25% width, then when a  user reduces the
browser window width, the left side will always stay a quarter of the
browser window width. This is fine up to the point when it will be too
narrow for the longest text items, and the lines will start wrapping.
If the left side is defined in units of em, the narrowing the browser
window will have no effect on the width of the menu, only the right
side will shrink in width. But the left side's width will adapt to the
size of font a user may use. This has no ill effect on various ways of
font scaling and page sizing as implemented by different browsers.

In particular IE uses a different method than Firefox and Netscape,
which is very annoying when visiting a website which uses fixed size
fonts (in points or pixels). There IE fails when the user chooses a
bigger font for instance.

> The two users who had the problem were using a 800X600 screen res. I've
> just asked them to change that to 1024X768. Maybe that will solve their
> problem.

I think a webdesign should accommodate browsers running on 800x600
screen resolutions, there are many user with exactly those screens,
probably the majority still (I have not got any statistics here in front
of me). So your suggestion is for me not a solution.

> To clarify. We're using the drop down skin. The problem is that the
> entire right panel that should be at the top adjacent to the sidebar
> appears below the sidebar, which forces the user to scroll down the
> screen to see what should visible at the top.

> Curiously, I get the same problem on my computer when I go to:
> http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/DropDownSkin

DropDownSkin indeed breaks like that on IE. The reasons for this I
gave in a earlier post, with  a suggestion how to mend this skin.
Sorry this seems not valid for you.

My only other suggestion is: use a different skin.

Best, 
~Hans                           




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