lucy24 - 9:54 pm on Mar 7, 2013 (gmt 0)

is there a way to detect that 1024 viewer's monitor and auto resize all the page content (text & graphics) down by 76%

Whoa. Careful there. Is your client looking at resizing the TEXT, or resizing the TEXT AREA? People with smaller monitors do not necessarily have better eyesight; in fact the opposite may be true. (Older users with older computers...)

Most problem will go away if you define horizontal dimensions in percentages. You may need to go to an entirely different approach if the viewport is really, really small so things will no longer fit side by side. But other than that, the only things that have to be sized in explicit pixels are images.

Loading up an image file and then displaying it as a percentage (with max-width so it is never bigger than actual size) is not the best answer. That just means that most users will be downloading more than they're seeing. There exist utilities, including third-party Apache mods, that will resize images on the fly so the user only downloads what they're really seeing. But you should be able to do it within the site.

Now personally I'd say this is the time to let the client stew for a while.

#1 Client insists on laying out site in a certain way, over designer's objections.
#2 Human users of client's site complain to client about the exact features that client himself insisted on.

#3 OP re-posts story to clientsfromhell dot net or similar site

:: snrk ::

I was thinking it might need a JS to detect the monitor size

Nope. It can be done right in the html. (Surprised me too, but I'm not complaining.)