Re: Frames Are Improving

At 9:54a -0700 08/22/96, Benjamin Franz wrote:
>On Thu, 22 Aug 1996, Jason O'Brien wrote:
>
>> The biggest problem
>> still to solve is the fact that everyone views web pages on different
>> display sizes, and this will forever be a problem for designing frames --
>> does anyone else have a standard they design for?   I have learned that
>> most people use 800x600, the in-between on most PC's -- does anyone else
>> have any kind of statistics on what most people use?   I don't know if
>> this problem will ever be solved when dealing with frame design.
>
>It turns out that MSIE is including screen size in their headers. I
>generated stats a few weeks ago. From about a million or so hits on
>XMission:
>
>37.3%    ( 640,480 )
>39.3%    ( 800,600 )
>20.1%    ( 1024,768 )
> 1.4%    ( 1152,864 )
> 0.1%    ( 1152,882 )
> 1.8%    ( 1280,1024 )
> 0.1%    ( 1600,1200 )

At 2:42p -0500 08/22/96, Murray Altheim wrote:
>I'd caution against making ANY assumptions about screen size or resolution
>(which noboby has mentioned yet). In the next year we'll start seeing the
>Web showing up on television and on PDA-type devices.

At 3:53p -0400 08/23/96, Matthew James Marnell wrote:
>what would braille and speech devices do, and all manner of strange
>screen configurations for PDA's and Network devices.  In the end,

And I hear Microsoft is developing a PDA. Heh, they will then become
incompatible with themselves!!! Should be interesting to see Microsoft
visit their own Web site with their own PDA -- maybe then they'll finally
recognize their own stupidity (see below).

>How likely am I with a 21" monitor to devote the entire screen
>to my web browser?

Right on. There is no direct correlation between screen width and window
width. My 17" monitor is 832 pixels wide, but I leave my browser window
at no more than 500 pixels wide. See, for fonts in the 12-14pt range
(which is fine for my decent eyesight), anything wider would cause line
lengths to be way too long for easy reading. Besides, the default window
size in Netscape and Mosaic, on both Macintosh *and* Windows (or so I am
told) provides about 470-472 pixels wide rendering area, and I see NO
reason to widen my window. I have better things to do with my screen real
estate. Nobody's web site is more important than my desktop to me, and I
avoid sites that think they have a right to take over my desktop.

>Right now my browser is set to 788x709
>to view a decidedly crappy page that uses absolute pixel widths for tables
>instead of relative widths.  Because I default to a decidely small
>font, the text is spread way out, and yet if it used relative widths
>I'd be able to keep the same width I normally do, and that I'm
>comfortable with, the text would be far more readable, to me at least.
>Just to give you a hint, it's one of the large browser manufacturers,
>and it's not Netscape.

Yes, I've sent email to webmaster@microsoft.com about their 745-pixel
wide tables. I love Excel, but I hate Microsoft. Sheesh.

At 7:16p -0600 08/23/96, 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).  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.

Exactly. :)

>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>.

Hear, hear. :)

At 10:31a -0400 08/23/96, William F. Hammond wrote:
>3.  When the user has sized a rendering window, it is impolite for the
>underlying application to re-size that window.

And it is just as impolite, perhaps even more so, to require the user to
manually resize a window by trial and error until it finally reaches its
optimal size. My <META NAME="WIDTH" CONTENT="500"> "metazoom" idea would
take care of this, if it were to be implemented (maybe via JavaScript?).

>4.  On a sufficiently large monitor of sufficiently high resolution a
>display of pixel size 640 x 480 has the visual impact of a postage stamp
>on a large mailing envelope.  The pixel is not really meaningful across
>the network.

Which is why we need vector graphics. It turns out that SVF is NOT a
cross-platform solution (I wrote to the company that created it, and they
have NO plans to port it and they know of no one else planning to do so).

Hmm...can a graphics applet have size="100%" with a specific aspect ratio?
I think that would be ideal for use with vector graphics.


-Walter

__________________________________________________________________________
    Walter Ian Kaye <boo@best.com>     Programmer - Excel, AppleScript,
          Mountain View, CA                         ProTERM, FoxPro, HTML
 http://www.natural-innovations.com/     Musician - Guitarist, Songwriter

Received on Saturday, 24 August 1996 16:05:50 UTC