<p>Now that most of the major browsers support full page zoom (at present, the only notable exception being Google Chrome), are liquid or elastic layouts no longer needed? Is the relative pain of building liquid/elastic layouts worth the effort? Are there any situations where a liquid layout would still be of benefit? Is full page zoom the real solution it at first appears to be?</p>

[{'answer_id': 62300, 'author': 'John Boker', 'author_id': 2847, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/2847', 'pm_score': 2, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>i think liquid layouts are still needed, even though browsers have this full page zoom feature i bet a lot of people dont know about it or know how to use it.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 62306, 'author': 'Noel Grandin', 'author_id': 6591, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/6591', 'pm_score': 5, 'selected': True, 'text': '<p>Yes, because there are a vast variety of screens out there commonly ranging from 15" to 32".\nThere is also some variation in what people consider a "comfortable" font size.\nAll of which adds up to quite a range of sizes that your content will need to fit into.</p>\n\n<p>If anything, liquid layout is becoming even more necessary as we scale up to huge monitors, and down to cellphone devices.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 62310, 'author': 'Craig Francis', 'author_id': 6632, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/6632', 'pm_score': 3, 'selected': False, 'text': "<p>Doing full page zoom in CSS isn't really worth it, especially as most browsers now do this kind of zooming natively (and do it much better - ref [img] tags).</p>\n\n<p>As to using fixed width, there is a secondary feature with this... if you increase the font size, less words will be shown per line, which can help some people with reading.</p>\n\n<p>As in, have you ever read a block of text which is extremely wide, and found that you have read the same line twice? If the line height was increased (same effect though font-size), with less words per line, this becomes less of an issue.</p>\n"}, {'answer_id': 62331, 'author': 'Raithlin', 'author_id': 6528, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/6528', 'pm_score': 1, 'selected': False, 'text': "<p>Yes - you don't know what resolution the reader is using, or what size screen - or even if accessibility is required/used. As mentioned above, not everybody knows about full page zoom - I know about it, but hardly use it...</p>\n"}, {'answer_id': 62401, 'author': 'halr9000', 'author_id': 6637, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/6637', 'pm_score': 3, 'selected': False, 'text': "<p>Yes, yes yes! Having to scroll horizontally on a site because some designer assumed the users always maximize their browsers is a huge pet peeve for me and I'm sure I'm not alone.  On top of that, as someone with really crappy vision, let me say that full page zooming works best when the layout is liquid. Otherwise you end up with your nav bar off the (visible) screen.</p>\n"}, {'answer_id': 62413, 'author': 'Anarchofascist', 'author_id': 6740, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/6740', 'pm_score': 2, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>I had a real world problem with this. The design called for a fixed width page within a nice border. Fitted within 800 pixels wide minus a few pixels for the browser window. Subtract 200 pixels for the left menu and the content area was about 600 pixels wide.</p>\n\n<p>The problem was, part of the site content was dynamic, resulting in users editing and browsing data in tables, on their nice 1280x1024 screens, with tables restricted to 600 pixels wide.</p>\n\n<p>You should allow for the width of the browser window in dynamic content, unless that dynamic content is going to be predominantly text.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 62482, 'author': 'Ola Tuvesson', 'author_id': 6903, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/6903', 'pm_score': 2, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>Stretchy layouts are not so much about zooming as they are about wrapping - allowing a user to fit more information on screen if the screen is higher resolution while still making the content acessible for those with lower resolution screens. Page zooming does not achieve this. </p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 62515, 'author': 'Bobby Jack', 'author_id': 5058, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/5058', 'pm_score': 2, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>Page zoom is <em>horrible</em> from an accessibility perspective. It\'s the equivalent of saying "we couldn\'t be bothered to design our pages properly [designers], so have a larger font and scroll the page horizontally [browser developers]". I cannot believe Firefox jumped off the cliff after Microsoft and made this the default.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 62912, 'author': 'liamvictor', 'author_id': 7278, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/7278', 'pm_score': 1, 'selected': False, 'text': "<p>Only your own site's visitors can tell you if liquid layouts are still relevant for your site. </p>\n\n<p>Using a framework such as the YUI-CSS and Google Website Optimizer it's pretty easy to see what your visitors prefer and lay aside opinion and instead rely on cold hard results.</p>\n"}, {'answer_id': 79108, 'author': 'Sarhanis', 'author_id': 7966, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/7966', 'pm_score': 0, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>Liquid layouts can cause usability problems, though.</p>\n\n<p>Content containers that become too wide become exceptionally difficult to read.</p>\n\n<p>Many blogs have fixed width content containers specifically for this reason.</p>\n\n<p>Alternatively, you can create multi-column content containers so that you get an effect like a newspaper, with its multiple columns of thin containers of text. This can be difficult to do, though.</p>\n'}]
['https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/62292', 'https://Stackoverflow.com', 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/1944/']