Recently over at , Adii gave a preview of his latest free theme. The preview sparked quite a debate about how the dimensions of a theme should be defined. Adii’s choice was to choose what’s known as a fixed
approach. Essentially, this defines setting the dimensions of objects in pixels
(px). This means the dimensions do not change from one platform to another, giving the designer a lot of control but causing potential issues for the end user.
Because the width of the layout is fixed, it will not alter for users viewing the site on a low resolution monitor. In Adii’s case, his theme would force a horizontal scroll for 800×600 users and a certain amount of the layout would not be visible without scrolling to the right. Adii’s argument for this was that very few people are currently using 800×600, newer computers work at resolutions upwards of 1024×768 pixels. However, there is a hole in Adii’s argument. A lot of people choose not to browse at full screen, perhaps because they’re multi-tasking and have more than one window open. So while the user may have a screen resolution higher than 800×600, they may not necessarily have any more space in the browser available.
AJ, of devlounge fame, argued for the case of flexible
layouts. To achieve a flexible layout, you simply set the dimensions of objects in percentages (%). This means that the width of columns and other objects are ba