Meta for specifying default resolution.

[cpucpu]

This is a problem that has been around since long time ago.
Websites don't look the same on different screen sizes under different resolutions.

I have developed fixed, liquid, and elastic sites in order to find a 'solution' to this issue. But none of them really seem to solve the problem in a consistent way.

-Fixed sized sites display more normal at more 'common' sizes, but has the problem of being displayed to little on big monitors with lots of "white space" around it, and look big on old ones. And this became worse as technology advances and new devices are created.
-Liquid sized sites are harder to maintain because tend to give more issues that the ones it tries to solve, like 'unexpected' proportions if not tested throughly on different devices resolutions.
-Elastic sized sites are similar to liquid ones but based on em's, and bring most of their same issues.

I have came down to the idea that there should be a way for developers to set a 'development resolution' so that browsers can automatically resize the browser accordingly. Something, that humans can do manually very well with in-browser zoomming feature, but have to do it every time for every site.
What if the browser could read a value(meta) that tells him what resolution the site was developed for, and through and algorithm, generate a scaling value, to further apply to the site if user has that feature enabled.

[JAB Creations]

Look up CSS3 Media Queries.

[BlueBoden]

This is not really a problem in modern designs, i do realize that most designers ain't aware, much less have the experience to create these flexible layouts. But this will very likely change in the future.

When you use the width property, and sets its value to a percentage, and then set a min-width to around 768px, and optionally a fixed max-width in px, you should be good to go on all current resolutions.

This problem is not solved easily, because the graphical elements on sites, such as borders and buttons, are raster based. Allowing designers to mess with the browsers zoom function, would only create other problems, and additional annoyances to the users.

Implementing such a feature would be a waste of time, since such raster based elements, are likely to be replaced by CSS alternatives and SVG's vector based graphics in the future.

Having that said however, it won't, for the most part, do any harm that borders and buttons look smaller on larger screen resolutions, they will still look "nice", and the rest won't be a problem if you used a percentage based, or semi-percentage based with max-width.

The zoom tool in the browsers is not implemented with designers in mind, but as a helpful tool for users. It should be kept that way, and designers should not be allowed to mess with it.