You've got a `fixed-width`-fixation. You've got to let go.

Eep! Both Stopdesign as SimpleBits have gone fixed width all of a sudden. A discussion on the matter is going on at Photo Matt's site. I'm quoting my own input in that discussion here for reference.

I like to specify everything in em values, especially the width of the displayed content. That way, the user agent’s font size value has no influence on the number of words that fits on one line, and with that an important part of the design. Changing your font size settings -on most of my sites- looks like zooming in and out on the entire page, rather than just the letters.

Because of limited support for SVG, I use a lot of img elements on my sites, and since setting the height and width values of those to anything that is not px doesn’t really improve the quality of the image that is displayed (understatement) these are not relative.
Because of that (and other, less important reasons), I like to set a min-width in px to the width of the displayed content. This way I prevent that the displayed content becomes (a lot) smaller than the images (or other static elements) it contains, when the user agent’s font size setting are decreased.

Last but not least, I know it is annoying to have to scroll both ways to read a text, so I always set a max-width value to the displayed content in %. This way, the displayed content does not become wider than the window when the user agent’s font size setting is increased, or the window is narrowed.

The CSS for the displayed content usually looks something like this:
#content {
width: 50em;
min-width: 300px;
max-width: 100%
}
I’m not saying this is the way, but it has been (and still is) for me.

Sincerly,

ACJ

11:53AM

You've got a fixed-width-fixation. You've got to let go.

You've got a `fixed-width`-fixation. You've got to let go.