Adapitve themes anyone?

[hgoor]

Hi all,

I would like to share some thoughts with you all....

I am a sucker for choice. Meaning: I like people to view my blog as THEY want it. So I offer a whole bunch of themes they can choose from.

However, most (older) themes do not "play nice" with my content.

I use YouTube a lot (I post a lot of my own vids) and I also use YouTube video lists. But they show up really bad with a lot of themes (even the newer ones like 'Splat').

With most themes there is a restriction on how wide the theme is. This is mostly based on the idea that a theme should be used on a minimum width of 800px (including sidebars). In reality it is even smaller because of the so-called "websafe" area (i.e. take scrollbars into account).

I do not like that.

User information about screen resolution shows that most people are at screenresolutions of 1024px and OVER... (in fact 84% is capable of 1024 and higher)

Don't take my word for it, check-out the stats:

see: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp and: http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats/

In fact: over 90% of all new PC's are bought with a flat panel TFT screen and this has bumped up the screenresolutions in general to a minimum of 1280px (as most come with a 17" inch screen).

Also we have the Media Center revolution going on: people with wide screen TV's that hookup their media center PC.

Why not use all that screen estate? Surveys show that most people that have a 17" screen surf in fullscreen mode.

But wait, you say; what about the ones that do not have the luxury of such a screen? That use a PDA?

Is there a way to cater to all those people?

Yes there is: it is possible to make your design 'adaptive'.

Just check out this article:

http://alistapart.com/articles/switchymclayout

I really like the ideas expressed there and I am very interested if this approach would work for a S9y theme?

A theme that senses that you screen is big enough for the 3 column layout with all the extras... Or that goes to a 2 colum view on its own.. Or even 1 colum...

Hmm... that would be some challenge, not?

[carl_galloway]

Its a nice idea, and one that that I would personally like to support, however I'm concerned about using javascript to to check the resolution, it is possible to do this with php, so we could add some small php to the config.inc.php template file which at least solves the problem of browsers that disable php, but I believe it is also possible to switch using smarty. I'm going to see if I can make this work, but its gonna take a while.

[carl_galloway]

another article worth looking at is the invasion of the body switchers, also from alistapart