What's a liquid layout?

Question

My designer keeps throwing out the term "liquid" layout. What does this mean?

Thanks for the clarification, I have always just called this a percentage layout, and thought he was saying that the pieces could be moved around, and that was liquid

Answer 1

In a true Liquid layout, your content expands and contracts to fit your user's browser window in a meaningful, calculated and intelligent way. So it's more than just setting your column and container widths to percentages.

Done well, this can result in a increase of perceived quality. Done poorly, it's a usability nightmare.

Going Liquid is a huge pain the rump. The pain is worth it though if the topic/client/product(s) you are building the site for have a strong visual quality to them (think summer blockbuster film site), require a certain fit and finish, or if it needs to display large chunks of data.

Note: I'll update this a bit later with links to good examples and citations for my claims

Answer 2

It means a layout which adjusts dynamically to the browser (or whatever client) width and height, to make efficient use of all available screen space, as opposed to (mostly) fixed width layouts which are made to fit a common denominator resolution at that particular time (e.g. 800x600 used to be the norm for websites for many years).

Answer 3

A "liquid" layout is a site layout that expands to fill the entire available area as the browser window is resized. Typically this is done using CSS. Liquid layouts can be quite helpful for certain types of sites, but they also tend to be significantly more effort than fixed width layouts, and their usefulness depends on the site content and how well implemented they are.

Answer 4

It just means that it will contract/expand to fill the browser's window size (usually the width), up to a certain point if things are done well. Otherwise text can get quite hard to read on big (24"+) monitors.