RE: Frames Are Improving

At 07:16 PM 8/23/96 -0600, F. E. Potts wrote:
> > 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).

On Sat, 24 Aug 1996 04:24:08 -0600, Paul Prescod responded:
> Is this a troll? There are more multitasking operating systems
> available for the PC than any other platform. The real point has
> nothing to do with CPU type and everything to do with monitor size.
> 15" is the standard because of the price.

"Troll"? No, just my Unix bigotry showing. :-)  And yes, I am aware
that most of the monitors folks have are around 14" or 15" in size
because of price considerations.  Just as most folks only have 256
colors.

What it gets down to is priorities.  If a large TV, regular visits to
restaurants, and a new car every three years is where your priorities
lie, that is your business, not mine.  And if this results in your only
being able to afford a 15" monitor for your home computer, that's the
way it goes.  All I can do is design my pages to scale properly so you
can utilize their content as well as possible within the limitations of
your hardware/software.

I have noticed during this thread on frames that the attitude of many
seems to be that since frames are often poorly implemented, they should
not be used; or even better, they should be banned.  This is poor
thinking: you might as well say that since HTML is so often poorly
implemented, it too should not be used.

Look around the web: you will find that many of the sites, especially
the more "popular" ones, have a tendency to have lousy markup, and even
worse design.  Over the last year or so friends have asked me for my
opinion of their pages, and when I mildly suggest (as often I do) that
they run them through one of the validation services, the usual
response is, "Why?  It looks good on Netscape, and that's what most
people use."

So what can you do?  Nothing, really, except to design your pages to be
as usable as possible for as many folks as possible, and let the rest
of it go.  As I noted before, the real problem is not monitor size, but
poor use of the tools currently available.

fep

--
fepotts@fepco.com
http://www.fepco.com/

(PS: CPUs were never mentioned, Paul.  When I say PC-centric, I am
basically referring to Wintel; I myself run BSD on two Intel boxes, as
well as 4.1.3 and 2.5 on RISC machines, so do understand these matters
slightly :-)

Received on Saturday, 24 August 1996 14:37:47 UTC