RE: Window Modes - best practice and scalability

Hi Robin,

Thanks for the response.

> On Aug 24, 2009, at 11:08 , <robin@berjon.com> wrote:
> Hi Richard,
> 
> On Aug 17, 2009, at 11:19 ,  <richard.tibbett@orange-ftgroup.com>
wrote:
> > The above [usage of MQs] could be a good method and/or using good, 
> > standard, liquid/fluid/elastic CSS design can go to some lengths to 
> > mitigate the rendering inconsistency of different devices.
> >
> > Is this best practice the generally held opinion of the 
> WebApps group?
> 
> I don't know that the WG has formed a common and documented 
> opinion on this matter, but I think that the examples you 
> give are good, and I believe others would agree.
> 

Should we any of this in the window modes spec (e.g. in the examples
section)?

> > My question though is whether we can go one further in our specs to 
> > allow for the scaling of widgets that have been developed 
> at a certain 
> > resolution (with or without the best practice above) to be 
> re-scaled 
> > according to the current device display.
> >
[trimmed viewport references]
> 
> I don't believe that there's been any discussion on this in 
> *this* WG, however it was discussed as part of WICD Core in 
> the CDF WG [0] though I believe eventually rejected. I think 
> the CSS WG has also talked about it. You could also wrap your 
> viewport in SVG and use that to scale and adapt the content - 
> but that might be tricky :)
> 

I can agree that this may have been discussed elsewhere as a general
concept for the web but I see this as having more relevance to widgets
and mobile web apps specifically. The type of scaling we're talking
about is not changing the look and feel (e.g. no proxy/content
transformation) but maintaining all proportions of the developed widget
and just changing the resolution at which it displays. Perhaps there's a
specific term for this: uniform scaling, perhaps? The concept of scaling
is largely fuzzy so it's good to document exactly what type of scaling
is on the table. 

So, uniform scaling is not content transformation or content adapation.
Adaption can be rightly left to CSS.

This ability for my browser to normalize whatever has been produced for
different resolutions on to my handheld screen is likely to be useful,
if not critical, for widget UX (think iphone webapps, for example, that
always fit to screen - albeit one screen size - through a combination of
viewport (i.e. proportionate scaling) and good CSS toolkits (i.e.
elastic css concepts)).

I'm unclear if we should follow-up on this or pass it over to another WG
- like the CSS WG (with the emphasis of this concept on mobile widgets)
but I'm interested on anyone's further thoughts.

Still a few open questions there that may be worth exploring a bit.


> 
> [0]http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-cdf/2008Aug/0000.html
> 
> --
> Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/
> 
>  
>

Received on Tuesday, 25 August 2009 10:02:56 UTC