Re: Frames

Hi,

Actually, looking at the site again I think they have done a pretty good
job. The layou of the other information is a general layout decision, and
would have occurred in any case - the white space was felt to be an important
part of making it comprehensible.  In order to mitigate the fact that it is
difficult to include the entire image on a small display the first line in
each content frame includes a link to the image on its own. I would prefer
that this was opened in the same window, but I guess life isn't all
victories.

I think there are design decisions that were made for this site which could
have been better, but overall I think the use of frames is not one of
those. (I think the use of tables and the assumption of a particular screen
size is. But I may be misinterpreting - reading motivation into the end
product is a tricky business at best.)

And you are right, the "playful" image doesn't fit in an 800x600 screen. But
that seems to me a compositor's error and not a reason to avoid using
frames.

cheers

Charles McCN

On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, Judy Schnitzer wrote:

  Hi, 
  
  Respectfully, Charles, I think the site you mention is a good example of
  one of the things wrong with a framed site, especially for people with
  low vision who are looking at the site and using a larger than average
  font and low screen resolution, rather than using a screen reader or
  speech browser, or possibly for someone with an orthopedic disability,
  for whom scrolling is more difficult.
  
  The top and bottom frames take up about a half of the page, leaving
  little for the content. Someone using a large font sees very little of
  the content at the same time, which I find makes it much more difficult
  to get a good feeling for the whole page. Even using a more average font
  size, like 12 point, it's still necessary to do a lot of scrolling. I'm
  guessing that some people with some kind of orthopedic disability or
  joint pain would rather do less scrolling.
  
  It certainly messes up large images, such as the one you see if you click
  "playful". Even using 640 x 480 resolution, I think this graphic would
  fit on one screen if there were no frames. With the frames, I can see
  only about one-third at a time. Even if I were using 800 x 600, I
  wouldn't be able to see all of it.
  
  Judy
  
  At 09:51 PM 2/15/2000 -0500, Charles McCathieNevile :
  Well, since Jim hasn't really provided anything to banish frames, let me take
  a bit each way...
  
  In addition to having well-titled frames, which can provide some guidance ...
  
  for an interesting example of a reasonably wll-done framedd site, try
  http://www.rachelmello.com (personally I'm not a fan of "splash pages", but that's not the question at hand...)
  
  
  
  
  Judy Schnitzer, Internet Marketing Consultant
  Customized eMarketing to match your needs
  Web Site Development & Tune-up, Promotion
  Research, Writing, & Training
  818-501-8202
  mailto:sitekre8@pacbell.net 

--
Charles McCathieNevile    mailto:charles@w3.org    phone: +61 (0) 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative                      http://www.w3.org/WAI
Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053
Postal: GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001,  Australia

Received on Wednesday, 16 February 2000 03:55:04 UTC