Design: Width

The DAC website's content is constrained with HTML tables to a (centered) width of 468 pixels, except for pages with large images (which are constrained to 734 pixels). This keeps integrated juxtapositions of images and text reasonably consistent for users with various monitors, regardless of browser support for CSS positioning. It also enables most viewers, even those with small monitors, not to have to scroll horizontally to see all content on most of the site's pages.

The vertical scrolling required on some pages enables their content not to be broken up into excessively small pieces spread across many pages. In these targeted cases this supports more efficient viewing and printing than would having to click through a series of pages on one small and coherent topic (e.g., a list of images for one class meeting, or information about a single exhibition), and is more intuitive and less irritating for many users than horizontal scrolling would be.

While a more fluid and wholly CSS-based design could allow page content to fill larger browser windows more fully, at present the necessary tradeoffs in CSS-based page designs' backwards compatibility with older browsers render this approach unworkable for the site. This is especially true for pages that include large images and related text. At some future time, both a more fluid approach and a uniform baseline design width of 734 pixels for all museum pages will be better able to serve the site's users.

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