When I think about web page design, they tend to have a fixed width, but potentially unlimited length. Normal apps need to fit on the screen. Web apps ... not so sure.
I'm working on an app with WebCore and the IDE is naturally trying to make it fit within the screen, since the Delphi IDE itself needs to do that.
But there are a bunch of things I need to fit on this page that could make it longer than the screen's height. To make matters worse, what's visible changes over time -- every couple of days, some of the elements need to change.
This particular problem is a challenge b/c the layout changes over time, based on some logic. When people try to build it in Wordpress, it's very complicated since the layout is done by a template that's fixed, and the logic is handled by plugins that are generally independent of template issues. So I'm trying to use Delphi with WebCore to do this.
For a web page with unlimited height, this isn't a problem. But I'm not exactly sure how to do it in something with a fixed height like a typical Delphi app.
For example, many web pages have a comment block at the bottom that implements a widget that acts like a Facebook post -- it actually is a single post in most cases. As people add comments, it just gets longer and longer. For a fixed-height display, that would have to be squished into, say, a 1" tall panel, or maybe a popup.
I'm wondering if these some way to show areas that fit at design time but are expected to expand at run-time.
Any thoughts?
(We don't build mobile apps in an IDE expecting them to look the same as desktop apps, so why would we build web apps as if they're desktop apps?)