About layouts

To display content on a range of devices you need to specify a layout policy with variants that are suited to different device characteristics. Then you associate the variants with one or more devices. You give every layout a name that MCS uses to associate it with XDIME markup. When you choose these devices, you also define one of two categories of layout; a canvas or a montage.

To display content on a range of devices you need to specify a layout policy with variants that are suited to different device characteristics. Then you associate the variants with one or more devices. You give every layout a name that MCS uses to associate it with XDIME markup. When you choose these devices, you also define one of two categories of layout; a canvas or a montage.

Canvas layouts

You will find that you can use canvas layouts for most pages targeting multiple devices. You can divide a canvas layout into panes that will display your web content.

With smaller device displays, you also need to consider ways to partition the content. For example, a page authored for a PC screen will be much too large for a PDA. The solution is to divide the content into a set of page fragments that are small enough for display. Then you provide navigation links between the fragments.

Montage layouts

In cases where you are targeting larger screens such as PCs with browsers that support frames, you can use a montage layout that can contain several canvasses. The relation of a canvas to a montage is similar to the relation between a pane and a canvas.

Montage layouts allow you to aggregate content from multiple pages into a single display. You divide the montage layout into segments (equivalent to a canvas) and allocate different canvasses (or another montage) to each segment.

If a device can render frames, it will display the montage with one segment in each frame of a frameset. Otherwise, it will display a default segment, with other segments linked to it.

Formats in layouts

You add layouts to your project with the New Layout wizard. Then you associate the layout with devices in the Layout editor. You also use the Layout editor to create a grid structure that corresponds to a web page. Then you add further layout formats to the grid, and assign attributes to them, such as width, height, background color and images.

Related topics