site review request

B McDonald pounced upon this pigeonhole and pronounced:

Thank you for expressing that point of view. And not that I've been seeking
any form of validation or even vindication. But I genuinely and
unantagonistically meant it when I asked why should I design for 800x600. It
was offered up as a site critique... perhaps (/perhaps/) a little
uncritically (sorry Mr. Shagnasty). But I've been all over this territory
before and I ultimately decided to shrink my goddam company header!

Yay! <g>

(wanna see? -- http://www.galtsvalley.com)

It looks much better now, it floats, and even works perfectly at a browser
width of 640. Nice job. Tina says it well: think NO resolution.

Think fluid.

I'm getting around to doing what Brian suggested as well... even though he
treated me like an opposing soccer fan.

I am a man not a soccer ball!

<rof,l>

--
-bts
-This space intentionally left blank.

"Brian" <usenet1 (AT) mangymutt (DOT) com.invalid-remove-this-part> wrote

There is no extra cost to creating a site that works on every
resolution. Why do you keep insisting that there is?

really? so, your site will work great on my PDA? all your images will show
without horizontal scroll?

Would you recommend that a site about photography have all images sized to
work on a PDA? What about a cell phone? Is that practical? I think not. I
would drop your site in a minute on my 1600x1200 screen.

Jonathan

--
http://www.snook.ca/

"Jonathan Snook" <goto_www.snook.ca (AT) snook (DOT) ca> exclaimed in <Ozcfb.78300$3r1.35652 (AT) news02 (DOT) bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com>:

"Brian" <usenet1 (AT) mangymutt (DOT) com.invalid-remove-this-part> wrote in message
news:cy6fb.482536$Oz4.327033 (AT) rwcrnsc54 (DOT) ..
There is no extra cost to creating a site that works on every
resolution. Why do you keep insisting that there is?

really? so, your site will work great on my PDA? all your images will show
without horizontal scroll?

Would you recommend that a site about photography have all images sized to
work on a PDA? What about a cell phone? Is that practical? I think not. I
would drop your site in a minute on my 1600x1200 screen.

A web browser provides you, the visitor, with a peephole into the
imagination of someone else.

You can compare it to taking photographs of artwork. If a painting is too
wide to fit, you'll have to step back, sacrificing detail to see the
whole picture. This is the nature of the physical world.

A photograph on the web has an intrinsic size. If that size is too large
for the browser, some genius came up with the idea of scrollbars - instead
of having the image cut, or having to rescale it to fit, the user can
move his little peephole about, seeing the entire thing. You do the same
thing with your camera if you focus on another section of the above painting.

That is what scrollbars are there FOR.

Textual content does NOT have an intrinsic width in the same way. That means
it is flexible, and can adapt to the size of your peephole - *unless* the
author has decided to make it hard on you by trying to impose a size on
the content that does not exist *in* the content.


Resolution - and it really isn't worth repeating any more - has nothing
to do with it. The nature of the content has everything to do with it.

Noone - and I mean NOONE - has claimed you should degrade your images to
fit someones window size.

--
- Tina Holmboe Greytower Technologies
tina (AT) greytower (DOT) net http://www.greytower.net/
[+46] 0708 557 905

There is no extra cost to creating a site that works on every
resolution. Why do you keep insisting that there is?

Jonathan's point reminds us that it's a very complicated client device world
out there. Almost too complicated to merit a rigid philosophical stance on
what might be considered "necessary" elements of good CSS-based website
design. That said, in my case, I think I agree with Brian and Shagnasty. The
only reasons I resisted making my site more accessible was because of (a)
sheer exhaustion and (b) lack of knowledge. But it wasn't an extra mile I
had to go. It was an extra inch. And I did it and it was nothing. It made
economic sense, perhaps.

I have designed for severely resource-constrained devices though, and
Jonathan's remarks stand at the very top of this argument on what it takes
to achieve universal accessibility. In the end, everyone has got to decide
who they're designing for. And the advice given them maybe has to take this
into account. Maybe there is no perfectly general advice.

I hope I haven't stuck my head out too far. Brian may come in for the kick.

(He's always just outside my peripheral vision...)

- the newbier Brian

Tina Holmboe wrote:

"Barry Pearson" <news (AT) childsupportanalysis (DOT) co.uk> exclaimed in
YB_eb.11$_o5.3 (AT) newsfep1-gui (DOT) server.ntli.net>:

been if it had talked about 640 x 480 screens? Is there any
plausible reason for any web site developer to spend an extra minute
thinking about the issues of VGA screens? In many cases, I suggest
not. Which suggests that we are

No, there is no plausible reason for any web site developer to
spend any extra time thinking about any resolution.
[snip]

I have replied to another of your articles, showing where the authoring
process often needs an investigation and analysis of the audience's monitor
resolution.

--
Barry Pearson
http://www.Barry.Pearson.name/photography/
http://www.BirdsAndAnimals.info/
http://www.ChildSupportAnalysis.co.uk/

Jonathan Snook wrote:

"Brian" <usenet1 (AT) mangymutt (DOT) com.invalid-remove-this-part> wrote in
message news:cy6fb.482536$Oz4.327033 (AT) rwcrnsc54 (DOT) ..
There is no extra cost to creating a site that works on every
resolution. Why do you keep insisting that there is?

really? so, your site will work great on my PDA? all your images will
show without horizontal scroll?

Would you recommend that a site about photography have all images
sized to work on a PDA? What about a cell phone? Is that practical? I
think not. I would drop your site in a minute on my 1600x1200 screen.

Precisely!

I think Tina and Brian are looking at the specific issue of how the final HTML
& CSS is written, and not looking at the end-to-end authoring process. That
needs to take such questions as yours into account. (This is a bit of a
puzzle, because Brian has put up a very nice photographic web site for an
excellent photographer!)

In the rather narrow scope of their discussion, they have a point. In the
scope of web authoring in general, things are much more complicated.

--
Barry Pearson
http://www.Barry.Pearson.name/photography/
http://www.BirdsAndAnimals.info/
http://www.ChildSupportAnalysis.co.uk/

Brian wrote:

Barry Pearson wrote:
[snip]
We may never be certain - either way. So we deal with uncertainty
in the various ways that businesses deal with uncertainty daily.

We are stuck with uncertainty about the hardware and software profiles
of a site's would-be visitors. That's the only thing we of which can
be certain. Knowing that, isn't it prudent to not shut any of them
out?

I have replied about all the sorts of decisions that I find need some
understand if the nature of my target audience and the technologies they use.

Some principles of marketing have served us well outside the web.

I've never been too keen on marketing types. They use a lot of
resources for no measurable gain.

Gosh! We will simply have to differ on that.

It is obvious that we don't need to serve everyone in the world. We
need to understand who we DO need to serve, and the trade-offs
between extra cost v. extra customers.

There is no extra cost to creating a site that works on every
resolution. Why do you keep insisting that there is?
[snip]

I've shown in the other article that there is cost involved. It isn't whether
it "works" in the sense that there isn't even anything visible at some
resolutions. It is a matter of whether the content can be shown satisfactorily
on various resolutions. Content often needs to be designed with a resolution,
and even an internet access speed, in mind.

--
Barry Pearson
http://www.Barry.Pearson.name/photography/
http://www.BirdsAndAnimals.info/
http://www.ChildSupportAnalysis.co.uk/

"B McDonald" <no (AT) spam (DOT) com> wrote

There is no extra cost to creating a site that works on every
resolution. Why do you keep insisting that there is?

Scratch what I said. Reading later posts I can see that I missed the point
of this screen size/screen res. issue.

Brian

Brian wrote:

Barry Pearson wrote:
[snip]
Where do you think those 800 pixels came from?

You made an arbitrary decision to design for that resolution.
[snip]

No. I made a decision based on the predicted resolution of my target audience.
That followed a lot of discussion, research across the web, studying of what
other people in similar situations were doing, and trial and error.

It is important to do suitable analysis when developing inherently visual
material for publishing the the web. How else would you expect image sizes to
be chosen? How could I, or anyone else, decide whether a photograph size of
700 x 500 or 1024 x 768 is the one to go for? (Or the size of a chart of a
graph). The size has to come from somewhere!

The decision HAS to be made - it can't be ignored. At some point, just about
every photographer publishing on the web has to decide " how many pixels wide
& high should my photographs be?"

The decision HAS to be a good one one, because so much depends on it. It
determines whether it will fit on a screen or have to be scrolled (which is
pretty bad). It determines how much of the sceen it will occupy. It will
determine the download time.

How would YOU decide how big to make your photographs?

--
Barry Pearson
http://www.Barry.Pearson.name/photography/
http://www.BirdsAndAnimals.info/
http://www.ChildSupportAnalysis.co.uk/

Barry Pearson <news (AT) childsupportanalysis (DOT) co.uk> wrote:

The decision HAS to be made - it can't be ignored. At some point, just about
every photographer publishing on the web has to decide " how many pixels wide
& high should my photographs be?"

The approach I like the best is one I saw at photo.net. Thumbnail images
are linked to pages that display larger versions as inline images. On those
pages, there are links to even larger versions. That leaves the user in
control, deciding how big an image is most useful, worth downloading, etc.
--
Darin McGrew, mcgrew (AT) stanfordalumni (DOT) org, http://www.rahul.net/mcgrew/
Web Design Group, darin (AT) htmlhelp (DOT) com, http://www.HTMLHelp.com/

"If you aren't part of the solution, then you are part of the precipitate."