
Fluid Grids - naish
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fluidgrids
======
jamesbritt
Very interesting. Sounds much like Typogridphy:

<http://csswizardry.com/typogridphy/>

I've been experimenting with that as well as the 960 grid CSS sets. Really
quite handy

~~~
ivey
Judging by the page itself, Typogridphy isn't a fluid layout.

------
wmf
They're getting there, although this article doesn't show how to combine fluid
and fixed-width columns.

~~~
moe
_doesn't show how to combine fluid and fixed-width columns_

Maybe because this quite nightmarish (yes, I've tried) and they didn't want to
ruin their premise. Generally the magic falls apart as soon as images get
involved or when you need to align something pixel-perfectly - which also
mostly happens when you want images to line up.

I'm very fond of the idea - but not so fond of the possible implementations
(including this one) that I have tried. The math alone drops you into the
funky realm of rounding differences between the browsers. Values like 14.575%
just don't come out the same in every browser and it's a bit of a gamble
whether you'll be able to fix the resulting uneven gaps or not.

There's also the issue of font-rendering. Most fonts are optimized for a few
standard point sizes and develop a nasty blur or bad kerning when you start
sizing them with em's or percentages instead of hard pixel values. The
aforementioned rounding variances make it near impossible to have, say, an
1.4em helvetica (relative to a 75% container) look crisp on all platforms.

So far I have yet to see a grid-based fluid layout with images that actually
looks convincing across browsers and platforms - without requiring kilobytes
and man-months of CSS hacks.

Over here we've had good success with pixel-based grids for graphics heavy
sites and fairly simple, albeit markup-dependant, approaches like Malo for
liquid layouts. We've also used the "holy grail" for n-column layouts but
found that to become a maintenance-hassle over time.

