Board Thread:Darwin/@comment-2118812-20130822134212/@comment-3474542-20130823025259

Imamadmad wrote: Having a changing width isn't a completely new thing on Wikia. Occasionally, when I check up on my wikis during the day, I'll usually do it on my phone in the Oasis skin. That already resizes content for the (much) smaller browser by making the content area skinnier, and has meant I've been thinking about this for longer than maybe some other users have. I actually think it would be a pain in the backside to have to edit for a fluid background. Consider for a moment header templates like some wikis have to mark articles for deletion, as stubs, or even just to mention the type of content, such as real world. If those templates are currently designed to work beside a (static) infobox, how will using percentages help? In some skins, the templates will be too big and overlap the infobox. In other sizes, it will be too small and leave a gap between them. In other places, people have worked images so they fit in a certain way beside a body of text. Having longer line length could affect this as there will be fewer lines between images which, on an image heavy page, could look bad. Another example of where it would go bad for images is when using them on front pages. On the front page of w:c:drwho.answers, we use a full-width image as a sort of a background/heading, and that would look off if in a fluid layout because the image then either wouldn't take up the whole width or it will go out of the content area. If using percentages instead of pixels, the image then will look bad on bigger screens because the image will be pixelated from being grown too large. Also background size, which I see you're already thinking about. It will be just that much harder to try and make content layout look good on all window sizes that I think it's more trouble than it's worth. However, I wouldn't mind if Wikia updated its standard size to the bigger content width. In fact, that would be quite good. I just think having something fluid will just make things harder on editors. Also, working in pixels is much easier than working in percentages, imo.

Also, I hate the pop-out table idea. I've seen a few around when people have made tables too big, and they look horrible. Better just to have the table resize with the window.

Actually, working in percentages solves your problem of header templates and infobox templates colliding or overlapping. You just have to make sure that the header template + infobox is less than 100% (don't forget to leave a couple % for padding. This will cause the page to scale much better than using "infobox = 300px", "header template = 1060px" for your sizes. (BTW - I usually use infobox = 30% and notice (or header) templates = 65%)

Once you get used to doing it, using relative sizes (%, em, etc) is actually easier than trying to get a ruler out and trying to figure out the size needed based on every resolution or screen size possible.

You can actually fix part of your table being too big for your screen issue by giving it a width of 100%. Then, no matter how big/small the screen, it will always be 100% of the content area. You will still need to convince editors not to create tables that need "a million" columns worth of content, though.