Flex design too flexible

So I’ve learned conclusively that I don’t understand this whole flexible design thing.

I’ve put together a set of pages that look good in x-Way, and look good in the preview, and look good on the web. Until I resize my browser window. Then everything goes totally wonky. It looks awful on my wife’s MacBook, and forget Chrome or Firefox. It’s a disaster.

I figure I don’t have a handle on when to use percentage dimensions, and when to use fixed pixels. At the moment, it’s all percentages, and it seems that all the boxes scale to different parameters and get completely out of sync with each other.

Any suggestions to set me on the right path?

Hi Crawford,

I’d suggest working through the Xway tutorial, which you can download from our website.

You don’t need to use percentage dimensions in most cases. It’s generally better to leave the width and height undefined. Undefined width will cause a box to take up the available width (in its parent). Undefined height will cause it to grow/shrink to fit its content.

I should add that we’ve just released Xway b5 (see separate announcement), and we’ve also updated the tutorial to use master pages (a b5 feature). We’re planning to make the b4 tutorial available separately (via Legacy resources).

More generally, if you add a container box in Xway, it defaults to being flexible (undefined width and height). You don’t need to add a width or height (fixed or percentage).

The b4 version of the tutorial is now in the Legacy resources section.