General CSS question from a Newbie to CSS

[jazzz]

Now that I am getting a better understanding of CSS I have a few general questions that don't seem to be addressed in all the books I purchased so I present it to you for your opinion.

1.) When designing with CSS should I build my pages to fit a specific monitor size or should I allow it to expand horizontally to fit any size screen and pray that my elements resize correctly.

2.) If I choose to build my site for a 17" display what is the correct width I should use; I believe it is 760 for width, height I would make auto.

3.) If I go with #2 and I use an element as my main drawer to hold all the others and I want to set it to the middle of any screen do I set its margin to do that and at what percent.

4.) Last question if it is better to size that the page fits the entire screen Width: 100% what is the correct way to size the three columns I have in the main container so that they scale correctly horizontally taking into consideration margins and padding so they don't move around on my page.

Thanks in advance guys your advice is appreciated.

Life's a journey enjoy the ride...

jazzz

 

[BillyRayPreachersSon]

1. Praying won't help. You should build your sites to match the design given by the designer... or if yuo are the designer, then it's personal preference. As long as your text scales, you don't always have to make the whole site scale... or you might choose to (see Coedit link below for an example).

2. Monitor size and screen resolution are not connected. You can have a 15" monitor displaying 1280x1024 and a 20" monitor displaying 800x600. You should pick a resolution that you believe most people who your site is aimed at are using. If these are likely to be designers, they'll likely have big resolutions. If it's Grandma Flo on a 486, she'll likely have a low resolution. I'd say 800x600 is a good resolution to aim for, unless you know your audience will be likely to have bigger resolutions.

3. You set the margins to auto, but if you want to support IE5 and 5.5, you'll need to use text centering, and revert this (again, see the Coedit link below).

4. This is personal preference / down to the design.

Hope this helps,
Dan



Coedit Limited - Delivering standards compliant, accessible web solutions

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[jazzz]

Thank you Dan it's a start. The visitor's to our site use mostly 800 x 600 so I'll shoot for that. I have a large screen but I know that the average Joe doesn't.

Life's a journey enjoy the ride...

jazzz