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Web & Flow
The Doctrine of Web Page Flow
Let us all gather together and grouse. “I worked really hard on my web page and finally got it the way I wanted it, but then when I was at Aunt Hilda’s over the weekend, I saw the page on her computer and it was nothing like what I designed. Is there any way to make the page look the same on all computers?”
This probably should be under the FAQ because it is a frequently asked question. The free flowing nature of web pages especially drives traditional media design people nuts. And the control freaks, the anal-retentive and those unable to think “outside the box” have trouble adjusting to web page flow, too. Here’s the scoop. If you can grasp the concept and allow your perception and attitude to change, you will most likely find the concept and practice of web page flow to be liberating and refreshing.
Keep in mind that web pages are totally unlike just about any other medium. The canvas is not fixed as it is with paper, film or television. Text and graphics flow in line, and you cannot gain pixel by pixel control. Plan your pages to flow, taking into account that:
- different browsers (brands and releases of those brands) will render HTML code differently
- people use different screen resolutions, so if you write a page with pixel widths stated for almost every element, the page is likely to run off the edge of the screen when viewed in a lower resolution setup. Or look scrunched and bunched to one side in a higher resolution setup.
The challenge of webpage design, other than making pages that don’t suck is to make them so they are functionally viable in all browsers. That is, they may not look the way you wanted, maybe nowhere close to what you wanted, but the content is still readable and the presentation makes sense.
I am well aware of the frustration over a page that simply will not lay out the way you envision it. For me, this is especially true when I design a page that looks great at different resolutions in MSIE, but looks like it was designed by a chimpanzee when viewed in Netscape. I know as I put the page together that a good bit of the code will be ignored by Netscape but I design the page so it will be functional in Netscape even if it does look a bit clunky.
Copyright © 1999 Carlton Higginbotham, Meade Street Productions.
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