This is possibly reopening a can of worms, but is there any possibility we could consider having any fixed width official styles? I know they are not accessible and can cause problems with font resizing, but at the same time, lots and lots of people really want them. The reason is that there are loads of cute tricks you can do with graphics and CSS that just don't work with fluid styles. (Pretty much everything in the CSS Zen Garden repository you link, for example: those designs can't be adapted for official DW styles because they depend on fixed width elements.)
When we get newcomers to the site complaining that there aren't any good styles here, some of us are like, wtf, there are nearly 500 layouts available, surely you can't hate all of them. But I get the impression that what people are complaining about is that there aren't any fixed width layouts. Which means that they can't have a header image or navigation banner which aligns pixel-perfect with the main entries column.
I can submit this as a formal suggestion for debate if you'd like, but what I'm thinking is something like, have a style clearly labelled as fixed width. Make it available in a range of screen resolutions / font sizes. That would give the real CSS stars a better canvas to work on, hopefully without compromising accessibility too much (especially as we already have 500 fluid width styles available). And I've noticed that the release-88 refugees community has some really awesome designers; it would be great if we could get some of their contributions worked up into official layouts!
The other thing about this proposal is that it would make a big dent in the amount of time volunteers spend helping people who insist on using Flexible Squares or Mixit/Expressive based layouts on DW. That was fine as a stop-gap measure when DW only had three layouts, but now the two sites have diverged so much, it is consuming a lot of effort, both on the Support board and in unofficial communities. It would be really nice if there were at least one DW-native base layout as appealing to layout designers as FlexiSquares and Expressive!
no subject
When we get newcomers to the site complaining that there aren't any good styles here, some of us are like, wtf, there are nearly 500 layouts available, surely you can't hate all of them. But I get the impression that what people are complaining about is that there aren't any fixed width layouts. Which means that they can't have a header image or navigation banner which aligns pixel-perfect with the main entries column.
I can submit this as a formal suggestion for debate if you'd like, but what I'm thinking is something like, have a style clearly labelled as fixed width. Make it available in a range of screen resolutions / font sizes. That would give the real CSS stars a better canvas to work on, hopefully without compromising accessibility too much (especially as we already have 500 fluid width styles available). And I've noticed that the release-88 refugees community has some really awesome designers; it would be great if we could get some of their contributions worked up into official layouts!
The other thing about this proposal is that it would make a big dent in the amount of time volunteers spend helping people who insist on using Flexible Squares or Mixit/Expressive based layouts on DW. That was fine as a stop-gap measure when DW only had three layouts, but now the two sites have diverged so much, it is consuming a lot of effort, both on the Support board and in unofficial communities. It would be really nice if there were at least one DW-native base layout as appealing to layout designers as FlexiSquares and Expressive!