I like this guy’s approach. Raw right from the start! Seriously though, he brings up some very important point’s with regard to design and use of CSS. Take a look….

You’re a Web designer, right? You fascist oppressor. What gives you the right to be so arrogant and close-minded?

Amazing, isn’t it? We’ve only just met and here I am insulting and berating you. And you don’t even know why, though you might have some idea.

Let me clear it up for you: in your last three design projects, you excluded visitors, ran roughshod over user expectations, and generally displayed a lack of understanding of the medium. This is the case no matter what design techniques you used; no matter whose books you read; no matter what you did. You thug.

What the blinking font am I talking about? I’m talking about Web design, which requires a constant balancing of pros and cons, and which does not admit to universally applicable answers. Unfortunately, this means that when you make a choice in how to style your site, you’re going to annoy somebody. Change that decision, and you’ll annoy somebody different.

Let’s take the eternal debate of fixed versus liquid (or fluid or elastic or jello or whatever term you prefer) layout. On the one hand, you have the ability to set your design layout at a fixed width, using pixels or ems or some other fixed unit of measure. This has the advantage of giving you a more-or-less controlled design space, and as a bonus can help overcome some annoying positioning bugs in IE/Win. On the down side, if a user has a really wide browser window, then there’s a whole bunch of white space to the sides of the design’s content; alternatively, a very narrow browser window will invoke the dreaded horizontal scrollbar…… Source: Vitamin

Tags: design, web design, layout, design techniques, horizontal scrollbar