Eatonweb | Rants

liquid html? is it really such a good thing?

several months ago the term "liquid html" became the latest buzz word. all the cool sites had it, and it was essential for everybody to figure out a way for our site to implement it. i'm sure this was happening in lots of web departments and design firms.

the concept of liquid html is fairly simple: instead of static width pages, the page will stretch or narrow to fit the browser width. this eliminates the ugly blank white space on the right (for those whose browsers were sized wider than 600px anyway).

but, did anybody bother to think about whether this was a good thing? i'm sure i'm betraying my age, but when i did print design for both manuals and newsletters, it was essential to keep the column width to a decent size. we talked about eye tracking, if the column width is too long you lose track of which line your on.

does this not apply to people on the web? if you've ever opened a text page full screen at high resolution on a large monitor, you know it still applies.

last week i had an argument with my boss because he was blindly pushing liquid html as an advanced form of web design. all i was trying to point out was that maybe we should analyze each situation and decide if liquid html was appropriate.

so am i the only one who is wondering whether this "advanced design" is in fact a step backward? isn't readability a key aspect of user experience? an extremely large number of people still persist in printing web pages. maybe because they're looking at them full screen and having trouble reading them?

i propose that we stop using liquid html, 600px wide is a perfectly fine width. and for those worried about that horrible white space at the right, we can just add some instructions on how to resize a web browser.