Re: Suppress scroll bars - an idea

At 09:49p 07/03/95, Mike Batchelor wrote:
>Walter Ian Kaye once wrote...
>>
>> The problem is that page size cannot be known in advance.
>
>The *browser* knows the page size, or even if there is a screen at all
>that can be paginated.  Therefore, a make-page-breaks style attribute
>would tell the browser to paginate the document to best fit on the screen
>it has to work with.
>
>> You could choose an arbitrary page size, but that would be making many
>> assumptions. At least be sure no graphic is wider than 470 pixels, because
>> that is the standard imaging area width for Netscape and Mosaic browsers
>> when used on screens 640 pixels wide. Anyone with a 512-pixel wide screen
>> or smaller would get the wrong size, although they're probably used to it
>> already. ;)
>
>Or, the browser could scale down images to fit the page it has to work
>with.  This is probably a good idea regardless of whether you scroll or
>page through the document.  Inline images are described as non-essential
>decoration, and the style guides I have read suggest using a link to a
>full-size image if the graphics are really essential.  Therefore I think
>it's perfectly fine for the browser to down-size an image to fit the
>screen.  If I'm not mistaken, the HTML 3 <IMG> tag will let you give
>attributes that define a size relative to the browser page, as well as
>specifying a size in pixels.
>
>It seems to me that resizing the page and paginating it is a natural
>extension of this idea.

Scaling only works well on solid or striped images (such as puffy divider
lines). If you have a graphic that is any more complex than that, the
result of scaling will be an ugly blotch. I am speaking of 72dpi GIF
images. Naturally 600dpi TIFF images scale acceptably due to their higher
information content, but who wants to put up (or put up with) such huge
graphics, even if TIFFs could be displayed by web browsers? Not I, not even
if I had a T1 line. ;)
I want to see graphics at 1:1 resolution, or not at all. And I want others
to view my graphics the same way. Otherwise, my time creating the graphic
is totally wasted!


-Walter

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Received on Tuesday, 4 July 1995 00:59:28 UTC