… it doesn't stretch, it doesn't squeeze…
First of all, the site design bug I'd like to bring up is so common as to deserve a site on its own.
The problem is that, with the font sizes set via browser's preferences to (or nearly to) their respective “factory defaults,” the site looks just fine (as shown on the first image.)
If, however, for whatever reason the user decides to increase the font sizes (think of visually impaired persons, for instance), the site suddenly doesn't seem all that nice anymore (as shown of the second image.)
Typically, the problem lies in the unwarranted use of CSS dimensions (such as: width, height, etc.) expressed in “pixels” (‘px’), instead of (arguably) much more appropriate (in most of the cases) font-relative ‘em’s and ‘ex’s. As a particular example, the ‘#menubar’ height is currently set (via CSS) to ‘30px’ (that is, irrespective of the font size chosen by the user!), while it may've been set to something like ‘2em’ for a considerably better result.
Any chance for this issue to be rectified?
TIA.
The only issue I can find so far (Chrome 23.0.1271.101 OSX 10.7) is that for seemingly random combinations of screen width and font size (some small, some large), it'll send the search results to the bottom of the page. Otherwise, it's pretty well behaved.
Did you change the font size proper, or just the “zoom level” setting? Typically, “zoom” is applied to both the font and the pixels (and thus images and CSS' ‘px’), although, e. g., Firefox allows the user to choose the behavior (via the ‘browser.zoom.full’ option.) On the contrary, changes to the font size per se usually don't affect the images.
BTW, the “payload area” of this site's Web pages doesn't seem to follow the changes of the browser's window own width, either. For this reason, the sizes of such areas should be expressed in “pure relative” units (that is, ‘%’), not ‘px’, ‘em’, or the like.
If someone can figure out precisely what's causing the main content and the sidebar to be pushed to the bottom of the page when fonts are enlarged, I'll fix it in the stylesheet.
That being said, I will not be converting my absolute sizes to relative ones any time soon, becuase absolute sizes are easier to work with when combining things with images (which don't change along with the font size). I'll do what I can to make sure that the main content doesn't get pushed to the bottom, but I don't want to get into the business of guaranteeing that OGA will look perfect regardless of screen or font size. I don't have the resources to do that.