Keeping Web Page at Fixed Width

"Harlan Messinger" <h.messinger (AT) comcast (DOT) net> writes:

That philosophy is exactly like the one I suggested where I send you a
typewritten list of all the words in my presentation, and let you build your
own book or magazine about it. You don't like the way Newsweek lays out its
articles? Then damn Newsweek for having the presumption to dictate to you
how its articles should look to you! The audacity! The gall!

Having seen some really badly-laid out printed documents, yes I
_would_ like to be able to re-layout them with a couple of clicks of a
mouse. Unfortunately, that feature isn't available on Paper/1.0

That the feature is available on the web is a good thing - if the
site's well designed (or at least appears well designed to whatever UA
I'm using today) then I won't mess with the design and I may even
appreciate it.

If it appears badly designed in whatever UA I'm using, then I'll take
whatever steps are necessary to get at the content. The first one of
these is usually 'look elsewhere'.

--
Chris

Harlan Messinger wrote:

You don't like the way Newsweek lays out its
articles? Then damn Newsweek for having the presumption to dictate to you
how its articles should look to you! The audacity! The gall!

There is a big difference. Newsweek print their articles themselves. They
know that what I see will be what they print[1]. On the web, there is no
such guarantee as the user renders it how they like.


[1] Assuming no printing mistakes

--
Chris Lambert (http://web.trout-fish.org.uk/)
Hey! It compiles! Ship it!

On Wed, 10 Sep 2003 17:27:12 -0400, Harlan Messinger wrote:

"Isofarro" <spamblock (AT) spamdetector (DOT) co.uk> wrote in message
news:j95ojb.3p3.ln (AT) sidious (DOT) isolani.co.uk...
The presentation is being rendered by the visito's user-agent, not your
servers. The sooner you realise that the better.

That philosophy is exactly like the one I suggested where I send you a
typewritten list of all the words in my presentation, and let you build
your own book or magazine about it. You don't like the way Newsweek lays
out its

That must be the worst analogy I've seen for some time. The reason your
example behaviour from Newsweek would be so bad is because it would be
extremely cumbersome. This wouldn't be the case if I had, say, a machine I
could feed Newsweek's content and house style guide into, which would
produce a copy of Newsweek on whatever size paper I wanted. A Web browser
is precisely such a machine.

articles? Then damn Newsweek for having the presumption to dictate to
you how its articles should look to you! The audacity! The gall!

No-one is suggesting that Newsweek shouldn't be able to layout their
magazine how they see fit (that's what stylesheets are for). But why
should they be making arbitrary decisions (like what width their content
should be displayed at), and forcing these on users who disagree?

I'll attempt my own bad analogy: would you defend Newsweek attaching a
device to each copy of the magazine which allows it to be read only from
cover to cover, with each page being displayed for exactly ten minutes? Or
would you think it better to let readers choose in what order and for how
long they read each page?

--
"Don't want to be your tiger,
'cos tigers play too rough.'
http://huh.p5.org.uk/

"Alan J. Flavell" <flavell (AT) mail (DOT) cern.ch> wrote

On Wed, Sep 10, Harlan Messinger inscribed on the eternal scroll:

Have you seen print ads from the 1920s? TV ads from the 1950s?

Have you seen web pages from the late 1990's? And folks are still
designing that HTML3.2(spit) presentational crud, despite the good
money being on something significantly better, the ideas for which had
been there from the start, but had been smokescreened by the quasi-DTP
crowd until relatively recently.

The design industry has learned much about adding impact to
presentations since then. A decision to *give up* techniques that
are proven impact-producers because *some* people may be using a
viewer on which those techniques don't function so well is not
lightly made.

Whoever said that _you_ (and anyone else who can use them) have to
give them up?

Umm--the person to whom I was originally responding, who said that fixed
widths *shouldn't* be used.

It's just wise to be aware that not everyone is going
to use your particular hammer, but will put your nails into their own
favourite nail-gun regardless of your preferences (to go back to the
rather strange analogy you were trying to make).

In visual presentations, what counts is what appeals to the eye,

Tell that to an indexing robot, quite apart from some proportion of
your human readers.

An indexing robot cares whether your presentation is fixed width or not?
Whether it is usable on a 200-pixel-wide device?

familiar shape to avoid having to learn something new. The very real
portion of the population that wants to use a browser window less than
800 pixels wide

... is small and shrinking

So you seem to have to tell yourself, in order to stay down the hole
you've dug yourself into, but meantime I'm told that hand-held
displays have really taken off in Japan already, and they're getting
around here too. On the other hand I was reading about 32-inch plasma
displays for domestic use. What's clear to me is that presentation
situations are getting inexorably more diverse.

And there's no hope at all for producing a page that will magically arrange
itself effectively on all of those devices, especially if we leave it to the
devices and the person using them to determine what should go where on the
screen.

Consider magazine articles. They have side bars, pull quotes, various kinds
of graphics to supplement the main story. These are extremely effective way
of presenting information. Writing for browsers on computer monitors, I can
use these techniques. If I design the page to flow freely, and a PDA
scrunches everything together so that everything has to be read in a
two-inch-width, 30-inch-high field stream, then pull quotes and many of the
graphics are going to be useless. I'm not going to count on the PDA to
figure something better to do with them. If, meanwhile, I'm simultaneously
reducing my impact on the standard computer screen, then the exercise will
have been an unfortunate one.

If I *do* care about having my material read in PDAs, I'll publish a
separate PDA edition with layout intelligently designed for that purpose.
The separate layouts for the different kinds of screens will be determined
on *my* end.

Which, in a different
context, was at the core of why TimBL felt the web needed inventing,
so that's just fine by me.

There are no legitimate expectations that a single presentation is going
to
be as effective or useful at 7 cm width as it is at 35, or that either
device is going to be able to take unformatted, tagged information and
be
counted on to figure out an effective presentation on its own!

If I was in business, I'd welcome having competitors who are so
determined not to take advantage of the benefits of this medium, but
want it to be little more than a computer simulation of a glossy
brochure, or of a video.

I didn't imply I'm determined not to take advantage of the benefits. I'm
saying that the benefits as being described here are in some ways illusory.
Stepping away now from discussing just screen width, I really am much more
interested in controlling the impact I have on viewers who are interested in
the material than I do on pleasing those individuals whose focus is on
whether I'm permitting them to change my text to purple. Some people call
that a benefit. I call it fluff. I have to admit that I'm also not someone
who has all six colors that his cell phone case comes in or spends time
changing the skins on his application windows. The way in which so much
emphasis is placed on colors and skins and personal configuration, and the
*militant* stance some people take on having these interests catered to,
reminds me of someone who shows more interest in the gift box and the
ribbons than in the present.

And if you think I'm wrong, then you're contradicting yourself. A
web browser on a computer monitor and a web browser on a PDA may be
alike in name, and the transport mechanism for getting information
into them may be the same (HTTP over the Internet), but they are
very different media,

They are very different presentation situations, just as a video tape
or DVD played at home is very different from a full-size cinema,

I'm not sure what point you're making here. The proportions are similar, the
apparent size of the TV and the movie screen can be the same apparent size
depending on how far you sit from the screen. The devices do *not* decide on
the layout. If the film's layout needs to be changed for DVD, then the
people producing the DVD do that, *instead* of using some flexible format
that lets the TV decide! Or they provide several formats and let the user
choose one of them, but the user himself doesn't participate in deciding the
layout of any of those formats. So, really, this situation is comparable to
the one I'm going with, where the producer of the material designs the
layout for the device and, if he wants to support multiple devices, designs
multiple layouts, rather than providing no layout and letting the device
figure it out. You've sort of made *my* point.

but
the web is still the web, and a film is still a film.

Expecting one type of design to serve both computer monitor and PDA is
at
least as misguided as you think applying print design principles to the
web
is.

You may have forgotten that this is an HTML markup group. You are
entirely welcome to offer different stylesheets for as many different
presentation situations as you want to consider; but the core idea is
that the HTML markup can be the same.

Granted. Which means *I* am providing different layouts for different
purposes. *I* am producing the style sheets. My presentation will appear on
the PDA the way *I* design it for the PDA, and it will appear on the big
screen the way *I* design it for the big screen. This is vastly distinct
from telling me I shouldn't use fixed widths because the *one* format should
work on every device from PDA to big screen. That's all I'm saying.

And any way you slice it, a PDA screen is never going to be a great way to
use a lot of what's available on the web, simply because the eye can take
good advantage of the random visual access available on a large,
two-dimensional presentation, and PDA screens will always be tiny,
one-and-a-half dimensioned, and require lots and lots of scrolling. There's
a reason why nobody buys 3-inch monitors to use with their PCs.

"Harlan Messinger" <h.messinger (AT) comcast (DOT) net> exclaimed in <bjpv3v$lcvke$1 (AT) id-114100 (DOT) news.uni-berlin.de>:

displays for domestic use. What's clear to me is that presentation
situations are getting inexorably more diverse.

And there's no hope at all for producing a page that will magically arrange
itself effectively on all of those devices, especially if we leave it to the
devices and the person using them to determine what should go where on the

You did very well up until now, but the above is incorrect.

*You* - or any other author - cannot produce a page that will arrange
itself efficiently on my, or any other, device. You do not know what that
device *is*, nor do you know how I use it, what characteristics it has,
or any of the other information you need.

Which is why you create a logical document independent of the physical
device.

Consider magazine articles. They have side bars, pull quotes, various kinds
of graphics to supplement the main story. These are extremely effective way
of presenting information. Writing for browsers on computer monitors, I can

That would be paper. When you print a book you know very, very well the
physical characteristics of the paper, ink, printing press, and soforth.

When you send a document out over HTTP, you know *nothing*. And that is what
you plan for.

scrunches everything together so that everything has to be read in a
two-inch-width, 30-inch-high field stream, then pull quotes and many of the
graphics are going to be useless. I'm not going to count on the PDA to

You have no idea what will or will not be useless. Only the end user has
that knowledge.

If I *do* care about having my material read in PDAs, I'll publish a
separate PDA edition with layout intelligently designed for that purpose.
The separate layouts for the different kinds of screens will be determined
on *my* end.

That is a very odd definition of "care". I don't fancy it myself. See,
I don't think you *know* how I want things laid out on my PDA.

two-dimensional presentation, and PDA screens will always be tiny,
one-and-a-half dimensioned, and require lots and lots of scrolling. There's
a reason why nobody buys 3-inch monitors to use with their PCs.

Do enlighten us. I find using my PDA to access my workstation quite
nice. Perhaps ... my requirements are not your requirements, and perhaps
I handle information differently ?

Perhaps my physical reality is different from yours - and perhaps that
is good ?

So why don't you just give your users information that can adapt itself
to their reality. That's caring.

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

Harlan Messinger wrote:

Granted. Which means *I* am providing different layouts for different
purposes. *I* am producing the style sheets. My presentation will appear on
the PDA the way *I* design it for the PDA, and it will appear on the big
screen the way *I* design it for the big screen. This is vastly distinct
from telling me I shouldn't use fixed widths because the *one* format should
work on every device from PDA to big screen. That's all I'm saying.

Tis true that a single one-size-fits-none fixed design does not work
well across devices, but that is not the entire issue.

You shouldn't use fixed widths not so much because of any one particular
device, but because you cannot know what the browsing environment is for
even any one given @media type.

Not all [insert device here] environments are created equal. In my
particular desktop environment, how can you know what my monitor size
is? Screen size? Window size? Operating system? Browser? Default
text size? Or any one of scads of other variables?

A fixed design by nature only really "works" with a particular set of
variables. Chances are, mine ain't it.

BTW, you delude yourself if you think *your* fixed design is ideal for
my environment. I'd bet money you're wrong, and I never bet money
unless it's a sure thing.

--
To email a reply, remove (dash)ns(dash). Mail sent to the ns
address is automatically deleted and will not be read.

"Tina Holmboe" <tina (AT) greytower (DOT) net> wrote

"Harlan Messinger" <h.messinger (AT) comcast (DOT) net> exclaimed in
bjpv3v$lcvke$1 (AT) id-114100 (DOT) news.uni-berlin.de>:

displays for domestic use. What's clear to me is that presentation
situations are getting inexorably more diverse.

And there's no hope at all for producing a page that will magically
arrange
itself effectively on all of those devices, especially if we leave it to
the
devices and the person using them to determine what should go where on
the

You did very well up until now, but the above is incorrect.

*You* - or any other author - cannot produce a page that will arrange
itself efficiently on my, or any other, device. You do not know what
that
device *is*, nor do you know how I use it, what characteristics it has,
or any of the other information you need.

Which is why you create a logical document independent of the physical
device.

If I expect that 5 million people will see my page at 800 x 600, and I feel
that 5 million pairs of eyes makes it worth my while to design a display for
that medium that will be maximally effective on that medium, why would it
concern me if there are a bunch of other people capable of receiving the
same stream but who won't be able to appreciate it? If there is a large
enough audience on yet *another* type of device--PDA, whatever, then it may
be worth my while to create another design that targets them, and that will
be maximally effective for them.

Consider magazine articles. They have side bars, pull quotes, various
kinds
of graphics to supplement the main story. These are extremely effective
way
of presenting information. Writing for browsers on computer monitors, I
can

That would be paper. When you print a book you know very, very well the
physical characteristics of the paper, ink, printing press, and soforth.

When you send a document out over HTTP, you know *nothing*. And that is
what
you plan for.

If I know that 100 million people use Netscape and IE on PC screens at
resolutions that allow comfortable use at 800 x 600, then I have a huge
market for which I can create a carefully engineered visual presentation,
the existence of users of *other* products notwithstanding.

Should I not write presentations in English because a German-speaking person
may come across it and then get ticked off because I didn't take him into
consideration? If the English-speaking market is large enough to justify an
English presentation, then I'll produce one, and if there are *also* enough
potential German-speaking viewers to justify it, I'll produce another one in
German. What I will *not* do is produce a presentation in one language, and
then place links for speakers of other languages that will let them
translate my page automatically into their languages. It may make them feel
catered to--and it will also mean they get a garbage presentation because
on-line translators at worst produce garbage and at best look awful.

The bottom line is that either the German-speaking audience is not large
enough for me to concern myself with, in which case I'm not producing a site
for them; or it is, in which case they'll get a professional translation
done or commissioned by me, not one delegated to arbitrary software over
whose translation I have no control.

scrunches everything together so that everything has to be read in a
two-inch-width, 30-inch-high field stream, then pull quotes and many of
the
graphics are going to be useless. I'm not going to count on the PDA to

You have no idea what will or will not be useless. Only the end user has
that knowledge.



If I *do* care about having my material read in PDAs, I'll publish a
separate PDA edition with layout intelligently designed for that
purpose.
The separate layouts for the different kinds of screens will be
determined
on *my* end.

That is a very odd definition of "care". I don't fancy it myself. See,
I don't think you *know* how I want things laid out on my PDA.

I have a hard time believing this idea that most consumers of information
want to be able to tailor, or have any interest in spending the time
necessary to tailor, every article, every FAQ, every order form, every
catalog page, to look as they want it to, given that all these years people
have been reading print material and watching television, without *ever*
thinking, "Gosh, I wish they would use yellow backgrounds instead of pink
for their side bars. And I'm going to stop subscribing to Goat Farmer Today
until they use Rockwell instead of Times Roman for their headlines." And all
the years I and my colleagues and friends have been using the web, I've
never once heard any of them make any similar comment about a web page.
Sure, if a site is laid out *badly*, they are aware of it. But that's all.

two-dimensional presentation, and PDA screens will always be tiny,
one-and-a-half dimensioned, and require lots and lots of scrolling.
There's
a reason why nobody buys 3-inch monitors to use with their PCs.

Do enlighten us. I find using my PDA to access my workstation quite
nice. Perhaps ... my requirements are not your requirements, and perhaps
I handle information differently ?

How did you ever manage during pre-web days, without having all your
information presented in a 2-inch by 55-inch column? I'm sure that even for
you (unless you are visually impaired, which is an entirely different
discussion), a two-dimensional screen where your eye can scan and find the
Search field, the highlights, the navigation, the ads, and the content,
without once having to scroll is a more efficient way to work with a web
page than a PDA.

I'm stunned by your implication that I'm providing information, but somehow
have no idea for what purposes that information is useful or what
requirements it fills.

If I'm presenting data in a twelve-column-wide table, either you have a use
for that information or you don't. If you don't, it has nothing to do with
the layout, and I don't expect to include you in the audience. If you do,
well, here's your two-dimensional table with twelve columns. Either scroll
or don't use the table. If your PDA will display the columns one after
another, chained together vertically, so be it, but while you can get the
needed information from it, the visual impact of two dimensions will be
lost. I'm *certainly* not going to design the table so it appears in that
format by default.

If I'm presenting a map of the US that show all county boundaries, and each
county is color-coded to show some piece of pertinent information, then
either scroll, or don't use my page, because the map ain't gonna be usable
at 2 inches wide.

Perhaps my physical reality is different from yours - and perhaps that
is good ?

So why don't you just give your users information that can adapt itself
to their reality. That's caring.

People in the trade have spent decades figuring out what works visually. The
correspondence I'm getting here indicates a complete obliviousness to this
accumulation of knowledge and the benefits to be derived therefrom. The web
is here, so let's throw every last thing we've ever learned about effective
visual presentations out the window.

I can see applying your approach to advertising. Never mind the clever
Absolut ads, the Benneton ads, and so forth, that have emerged over the
years. Let's just send text that says "<ad>Absolut Citron--imagine a bottle
in the shape of a lemon</ad>"; "<ad>Benneton--we have colorful clothes.
Imagine them on two people of different races sitting on a seesaw and
throwing a bowling ball back and forth.</ad."

"kchayka" <kcha-ns-yka (AT) sihope (DOT) com> wrote

Harlan Messinger wrote:

Granted. Which means *I* am providing different layouts for different
purposes. *I* am producing the style sheets. My presentation will appear
on
the PDA the way *I* design it for the PDA, and it will appear on the big
screen the way *I* design it for the big screen. This is vastly distinct
from telling me I shouldn't use fixed widths because the *one* format
should
work on every device from PDA to big screen. That's all I'm saying.

Tis true that a single one-size-fits-none fixed design does not work
well across devices, but that is not the entire issue.

You shouldn't use fixed widths not so much because of any one particular
device, but because you cannot know what the browsing environment is for
even any one given @media type.

Not all [insert device here] environments are created equal. In my
particular desktop environment, how can you know what my monitor size
is? Screen size? Window size? Operating system? Browser? Default
text size? Or any one of scads of other variables?

A fixed design by nature only really "works" with a particular set of
variables. Chances are, mine ain't it.

BTW, you delude yourself if you think *your* fixed design is ideal for
my environment. I'd bet money you're wrong, and I never bet money
unless it's a sure thing.

And yet I've produced many 800 x 600 web pages that display just fine in a
variety of Netscape and IE versions and therefore are useful for millions
upon millions of people, which together make up, typically, 90-95% of the
people who visit the site. They work on screens from 800 x 600 to 1280 x
1024 and beyond (because no one is making people maximize their browsers),
and they work on Windows and Macs. I make no claim that they're usable by
everyone. I claim that they're usable by enough of the market to justify the
effort, and that the benefits of suiting the remaining market has not
clearly justified the additional effort to do so, or any detraction that
would result to the presentation on the primary platforms.

Greg Schmidt <gregs (AT) trawna (DOT) com> wrote:

At this point there is no reason other than laziness for anyone to be
using a version of IE, Netscape or Opera less than 6. (Don't talk to me
about schools and corporations, that's just institutional laziness. And
don't talk to me about old hardware, since all reports are that Opera
will run quite nicely right down to 386s.)

I've used Opera 3.6 on a 386 laptop, and it was indeed very usable. But
that was the last version of Opera to support MS Windows 3.x, and the 386
doesn't have enough horsepower for later versions of MS Windows.

Maybe you could install Linux and a modern browser on a 386, but it would
be cheaper to buy a used P2 system (or equivalent) than to pay for the
expertise needed for the software upgrade.
--
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 ate pasta and antipasti, would you still be hungry?" - George Carlin

Harlan Messinger wrote:

"Isofarro" <spamblock (AT) spamdetector (DOT) co.uk> wrote in message
news:j95ojb.3p3.ln (AT) sidious (DOT) isolani.co.uk...
Harlan Messinger wrote:

Your analogy is inaccurate in significant ways. The presentation is the
nail. Print media are the hammer.

So what gives you the right to demand _my_ hammer to knock in your screw
and
then stand there in amazement when I tell you where to shove your screw?

The presentation is being rendered by the visito's user-agent, not your
servers. The sooner you realise that the better.

That philosophy is exactly like the one I suggested

In your print world you would render the content before it is sent to the
user. On the web the rendering happens after the content has been received.
A strawman argument isn't going to help you.


--
Iso.
FAQs: http://html-faq.com http://alt-html.org http://allmyfaqs.com/
Recommended Hosting: http://www.affordablehost.com/
Web Design Tutorial: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/1010