site not scaling with browser

Freeway
1

I thought that if I changed the page alignment in my site from “centered” to “none” it would be scalable with the browser (if I pulled the window smaller or larger, it would scale accordingly). It’s not happening here. Did I miss ~or misunderstand~ something?

http://www.fonsecadesign.com/dgmbeta/about/mission.html

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2

Don’t know much about dealing with tables, but I see that some of these tables have width’s attached to them. I see a width of 246 and a width of 570 on here.

Might I suggest you do a CSS-based layout (blue button on) and follow Big Erns here in doing so:

http://www.thebigerns.com/freeway/shrinky/

Perhaps someone else who does tables might be able to help you out further. Good luck.

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3

I never turn the blue (css) button off. Some items have layer checked, and others do not, depending on the situation, but the css button is always on. Does anyone know of a way to do this? I don’t think I shouldn’t have to recreate if the button has always been on.

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4

When a layout is made using layers, any tables drawn with the table
tool will be of fixed size. If you make the table and all elements
around it non-layered objects (just un-check the Layer checkbox in
the Inspector when the item is selected), then you will find the
Width Can Grow option on one of the other tabs of the Inspector. If
you check that, you should be able to stretch your table elements as
the browser is adjusted.

Walter

On Jul 1, 2008, at 1:22 AM, rebeccintosh wrote:

I never turn the blue (css) button off. Some items have layer
checked, and others do not, depending on the situation, but the css
button is always on. Does anyone know of a way to do this? I don’t
think I shouldn’t have to recreate if the button has always been on.

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5

Hi Walter,

Sorry. I’m confused. I didn’t draw anything using the table tool … just html and graphic boxes (some with layers on, and some off. I’ve also got a css menu, transitional effections on some of the images, and flash swf (flash on the home page only). But no tables.

This page is pretty much the layout throughout the site:
http://www.fonsecadesign.com/dgmbeta/about/mission.html

(exception) Home page (with flash):
http://www.fonsecadesign.com/dgmbeta/index.html

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6

The graphic boxes with layers turned off are positioned by Freeway using invisible tables. If you’re doing a fixed layout, you can probably ignore what Freeway is doing “behind the scenes”, but if you want to launch into all the fun of a flexible layout, you need to know what is going on. There are in fact two tables in your page: one for the logo and one for the main part containing the photos.

If you want to transform your layout into a flexible one, the first thing you need to do is to decide what should be flexible. The first page you linked to could work as a three column layout with a flexible middle column, but not the home page, nor the “location” page. I don’t think it would be a good idea to make all the pages stretchy apart from those two: for consistency across the site it would be better to re-think those two pages so that they can stretch as well.

If you do decide to make your page stretchy using CSS, I recommend that you first make a dummy page to get an idea of how this works. Here is (I think!) the simplest way of making a three column layout with a flexible middle column:

  • Draw three HTML layers side-by-side. Look at “Dimensions” on the inspector palette, and particularly at the three settings on the left, which are “Left inset” (distance from the left-hand browser edge), “Width” and “Right inset” (distance from the the right-hand browser edge). Note that only two of these settings can be active at the same time.
  • For the left element, the first two settings in the left column (“Left inset” and “Width”) should be active.
  • For the middle element, the settings “Left inset” and “Right inset” should be active.
  • For the right element, the settings “Width” and “Right inset” should be active.
  • Give each element a colour and preview in a browser. When you change the width of the browser window, the middle element will also change width and the right element will move accordingly.

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7

Thank you. I will try this out (saving a copy of the file, of course)! I don’t think this is “scalable”, though. If someone was viewing it on a laptop with a small screen (which one of my clients were), I’d like it to scale everything proportional to fit in the browser. I remember this could be done with the index file that the flash sites generated. (If the user drags the lower left-hand corner of the browser to make the window smaller, the content would scale with it.

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8

Flash is a different kettle of fish - essentially images.

Firefox does a similar job of displaying single images in the browser ie scaling them to match the size of the browser window.

But the problem is that web pages are not single images (unless you created them that way) but a mixture of html text and images and as such cannot respond in that scalable way.

The best that you can hope for is a ‘flexible’ layout that can expand/stretch to fit the width of the browser window but not the height.

If you did create your site as single ‘page’ images you would get the effect you want in FF but other browsers wont be your friend. And besides a page image reduced to fit a small screen would have an unreadable size of text.

So the long and short of it is - create a flexible layout to suit different browser window sizes.

Have a look here: http://softpress.com/kb/article.php?id=728

David

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9

Got it. Thank you all!

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