RE: Frames Are Improving

On Fri, 23 Aug 1996 14:46:02 -0600, Jason O'Brien said:
> Using relative widths for frame design does very little good anyway
> -- the content in the frame is usually designed to fit into a certain
> area (such as a corporate logo) and different monitor size either
> fits this content perfectly in the area as it was intended to be or
> chops off part of the content or puts too much white space.   I don't
> think frames have much in future in web design.

This seems to be a PC-centric way of looking at things, where folks
allow the UA to take over all their screen real estate (perhaps because
they live within a single-tasking computing paradigm).  But this is
tourist behavior; those who use the web on a daily basis are far more
likely to set their UA window at some fraction of their screen real
estate so they can use other areas for xterms, etc.

I know, I know: 20" monitors and 24-bit frame buffers ain't the norm.
But there is not much else one can do but do the best they can with
what they have, for none of us control the world, or the web.

I use a 7.25"x7.25" UA viewing area (Netscape.TopLevelShell.geometry:
=631x790) because that is a comfortable size to use for reading text,
and design my pages (both frame and noframe) to scale to the reader's
viewing area, whatever that may be.  I avoid logos and fancy gifs that
will not scale, and as a result my pages look okay across a variation
of viewing areas from 4.50"Wx4.00"H to <ugh>full monitor size</ugh>.

HTML 3.2 and even frames can serve us well if we put a little thought
into our pages.  Nothing is going to work well if we don't.

Regards...
Fred

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fepotts@fepco.com
http://www.fepco.com/
ACS Publishing/FEPCO Holdings, Inc.
3906 West Ina Road, Suite 200-211
Tucson, AZ 85741

Received on Friday, 23 August 1996 21:19:29 UTC