The page is designed for modern PC resolutions---that is, 1280 or greater width.
Since it uses a 300px right-hand sidebar in conjunction with fairly generous
margins (for the index pages, at least), this causes problems with smaller
resolutions.
For the classic (but outdated) 1024px resolution, the margins will adjust to
give more viewing room. For 640px or less resolutions, which are common on some
mobile devies such as tablets, the headline that is normally displayed in the
sidebar is moved to the top and the images are significantly reduced in size,
providing 300px additional viewing width. The 42x42px images that are displayed
below the GNU logo on the upper-right are also moved to the top of the page and
to the left of the GNU logo and certain other margins (such as blockquote and
ul) are reduced.
At around 400px, the images next to the GNU logo start to become problematic and
may overlap with the title; therefore, the size of the images are halved so that
they can fit above the title. This happens to be close the resolution of certain
mobile devices, such as the iPhone (which unfortunately I see many hits from in
my sever logs) with a width of 320px, so this is the layout that will be used
for such devices.
Note that the styles for these widths are build atop of the existing rules and
essentially ``undo'' certain styles; this is to fall back to the default desktop
style in case the browser does not support such media queries.
Previously, the headline (which is essentially a sidebar) was floated to the
right; this had the benefit of allowing the content to surround it on the lower
portion of the page, though that's arguably a poor design decision. With this
change, this does not occur, but the real reason for this change was to ensure
that block elements (such as divs) do not overflow into the headline.
This uses minimalist styling---as much as possible is done using the body
element. The footer positioning was tricky with varying content length. Since
the headline currently contains only images, my decision was to just get away
with setting a min-height to something reasonable for the headline content
height.
This was a bit of a difficult decision. One one hand, I perferred for the user
to select his/her own font via their browser settings. That said, the user still
has the option to override the font and use his/her own defaults.
This font choice is nearly identical to the current site font choice.
Mike Gerwitz