A funny tale is that I remember my first ever CSS layout adventure where I made an elastic layout almost by accident, naively, and everyone around me said it was wrong. I put my hands into special gloves and stopped touching myself there immediately!

I tend to give IE a fixed width (stuff them) and everyone else gets a percentage based width using max and min widths. It seems to work the best with the least complaints (not sure what my personal site does at present as I’m reworking new templates etc).

No elastic is the wrong name. How about pseudo-elastic design…???

Thanks for that, I’m not sure it would work for a layout div with a width in EM values (due to the font-value in IE not changing with the user’s font-size), but I’ll certainly try it on this site for the pictures!

img {
max-width:98%;
width:expression(
this.width > this.parentNode.width ?
“98%”:
“auto” );
}
seems to work great. hopefully this helps (even if it is a bit late)

Well, this site is fluid and (by my definition) elastic, as are the sites my company does (see Nomensa’s portfolio).

For font-based, I can’t think of any off hand (that are public), but the alistapart example should show you what it’s like.

I beg you to introduce me to some example of websites with flexible layout & font based layout & elastic layout& fluid+elastic layout.

True, but not for the majority, and it isn’t something you can have both ways without a style switcher or something on the user-agent end.

The dots per inch (DPI) setting for the monitor could be higher, so any browser which respected this would be using larger-than-default text.

I don’t think any of them do, which kind of scuppers that line of thinking. Firefox used to have an option for it that worked to a degree, but that was dropped in 2.0 from what I can see. Basically, without a zoom, 1px is a static measure. In the scenario you are arguing for, you would have a situation (say at 1900 wide) where the text is enlarged but the images are not, which might be fine for text but would images tiny.

In any case, if 1px isn’t static, then the max-width in px would be proportional, as that measure would be bigger. Basically you’d be in the same position as having a zoom, and I don’t think is what you are trying to get.

And then there’s the issue of text size. For someone browsing at a larger-than-default text size, 1280px lines (or even 1900px lines) may actually contain fewer characters than 1024px lines at the default text size.

And as we agree, on a high-resolution screen 1px wouldn’t be as physically wide as you might expect. The dots per inch (DPI) setting for the monitor could be higher, so any browser which respected this would be using larger-than-default text. You could have the same number of characters per line in 1900px in this setup as you do at 1024px at default text sizes.

Adding a px upper limit prevents a website from being resolution independent (aka device independent), something which is becoming ever more important as screens get more diverse.

Am I making any sense at all? I’ll wait for the next article…