RE: HTML tag addition suggestion, to "solve" future browser display problems

At 1:36a -0800 01/04/99, Braden N. McDaniel wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Brian Schweitzer
>> Sent: Sunday, January 03, 1999 12:47 AM
>>
>>  I may design a document to look best in 800x1024 resolution,

Bad idea. The web is a heterogeneous environment.

>> when viewed with Netscape's latest non-beta
>> release.  Ok, so it will look fine under the exact same situation, and
>> depending upon what I used in the document, it may always look right.
>> But what if I used the most up to date tags, and am then viewing it in
>> IE5b2 at 600x800?  It looked fine before, but now it may be a complete
>> mess.
>
>But this is mostly a problem with the design strategy. The underlying medium
>is scalable.

Exactly.

>> This could also be used by browsers to automatically adjust the size
>> of images contained within a document (if the design res was 1028x800,
>> and the image is 200x100, and the viewing res is 800x600, then the
>> image would be scaled down to the appropriate size, to take up an
>> equal amount of physical space on the screen, rather than appearing
>> larger (or smaller) than possibly intended.  In conjunction, an
>> RDEPTH#ALT modifier to an image tag could be specified, so that rather
>> than shrink down the existing image, a different one would be used
>> (like the tags already in use for fast/slow connections, to show one
>> image while a larger one downloads).
>
>But isn't the important thing how much of the browser window the image takes
>up, and not how much of the screen it might take up?

Also true. On my 832x624 monitor, my browser window is 480px wide.
(I use the rest of my screen real estate for other running programs,
accessing desktop icons, etc.)

>Furthermore, authoring for a particular browser size has always been an
>affront to general usability. Browsers are already capable of scaling a page
>to mulitple resolutions and browser window sizes; authors just have to take
>care to use relative sizes for the majority of applications.

Absolutely. There are pros and cons to HTML, PDF, Word, Quark, TeX, etc.
If you use HTML, build on its strengths instead of trying to make it act
like some other medium. Scalability is a feature, not a bug. :)


-Walter
 scalability maven

Received on Monday, 4 January 1999 19:30:56 UTC