BTW the compact content plugins have been updated with a bunch of small fixes (IE6 benefits the most from this release). See new examples, downloads and changelog for version 3.5.

Most media query implementations I have seen use px units to define min-width and/or max-width limits. This approach is fine for browsers that zoom, but less than ideal for browsers that don’t. Not a huge issue when you consider that the modern browsers that support media queries all zoom by default! But fortransformer layout to retain support for older browsers that don’t zoom, em units would be the way to go.

Firstly, I ran some tests of current browser support for CSS3 media queries using em units, the results were:

• Firefox (3.6.2) and Opera (10) support media queries with em units and load the correct stylesheet after zoom level change.
• Chrome (4) and Safari (4) support media queries with em units but fail to load the correct stylesheet after zoom level change.
• IE (6, 7 and 8 ) do not support media queries at all.

Alexander Farkas has a nice solution for detecting media query support and supplementing for non-supporting browsers but unfortunately it doesn’t support em units or compensate for Safari and Chrome’s insufficient handling of zoom level changes.

The new transformer layout plugin takes Alexander’s great work and rectifies both of those limitations so now it can be used to achieve an approach to layout optimised for all browsers, devices, resolutions, text sizes and zoom levels.

While doing this, I thought I should take the time to document the updated approach I use when creating groups of UI elements for my DHTML projects.

Let me know your thoughts.

Some web designers like to lock a page design to a fixed width (or set a minimum width) forcing a horizontal scrollbar at lower resolutions for the entire site. This approach however does not accommodate some of the larger content types and I feel its a missed opportunity to maximise accessibility. A flexible layout allows your design to be adaptable and optimised for the device/resolution currently being used to view it.

I’ve been playing with some ideas that can be used in conjunction with any layout to accommodate wide content as easily as possible at lower resolutions.

With this example, trying resizing your browser window, make it fairly narrow.

• Large content such as tables should expose a horizontal scrollbar just below the table at low resolutions.
• Images will be scaled down to fit the width available automatically. Scaled images also gain the ability to zoom to full size on click (which also introduces a horizontal scrollbar for the image).

The code is not production ready yet (IE6 in particular needs work) but it should give you an idea of where it’s heading.

Let me know what you think!

Again, the concept is not quite production-ready, but the OS mantra is Release early. Release often (and a week between updates is often for me ).

The key improvement of this release is that it will run well in common browsers (tested in Firefox 2, Opera 9, Safari 3).

There are still some styling issues to work through and a couple of functionality issues with IE6.