Re: Defining safe areas for media devices and set top boxes

I am understanding your view better, but even so... 

Whether the UA is on the TV itself (as I would fully expect to be more and more common), or on a device connected to the TV, authors are not taking the time to write special CSS rules for their pages to look good in standard definition, because it is too onerous to do so. In theory, they could have done so for years, right? I am not anticipating this to change, because of all the problems with extremely limited resolution/pixel-count, unsafe zones, color that is all over the place, interlacing, etc. 

So whatever you do, you won't have content that looks good in standard definition. So regardless of whether the device knows or not about the screen, Web pages will look bad if the device is hooked up to a standard def TV, even if you have defined an SD-friendly unsafe zone for authors to deal with. I just don't anticipate most authors putting any effort whatsoever into something that primarily is a problem with standard definition TVs, because it still requires so much more effort for an author to support SDTV than it does to support HDTV (mostly just as it has been for years), AND because HDTV is most likely going to be the future of all TVs eventually.

I am an author. I once tried to accommodate WebTV. It wasn't worth the effort, and I needed to spend my time and attention on other things. I can easily imagine adapting the site I work on to look well and work well on HDTVs, just as I did for iPads and phones. I really can't imagine trying again to make it look good on a 640x480 maybe-interlaced screen with unsafe areas, along with all the other SDTV issues, plus all the other (HD)TV differences to deal with anyway (bigger fonts for distance viewing, different input/navigation methods, etc.).

On Dec 7, 2010, at 9:12 AM, Joćo Eiras wrote:

> 
>> OK, but I seem to be hearing two different things. On the one hand, people seems to react against me saying that tube (CRT) technology was a dying technology for TVs, as though it was inflammatory for me to say so, and not merely a straightforward statement of uncontested fact (I no longer see them being sold at stores, at least in the US). On the other hand, you said that "low-res TV is completely out of scope". And back on the first hand again, you are now saying that low-res TV is relevant, because people will still have older SD TVs for years.
>> 
> 
> I mistyped and you misinterpreted. I replied:
> 
> # Whether regular web page are visible on a low-res TV is completely out of scope of my initial subject.
> 
> when I meant
> 
> # Whether regular web pages are visible or not on a low-res TV is completely out of scope of my initial subject.
> 
> Meaning, the quality of the TV doesn't matter because the browser is running on a device which doesn't know much about the screen.
> 
>> I am just trying to determine how long-lasting and relevant the problem is. IF (and I do say "if") it is relevant only to:
>> 
>>   a) CRT TVs that are no longer being sold which don't display Web pages well anyway for a variety of reasons, and 
>> 
>>  b) naive installation of inappropriate cabling (a problem I would expect to diminish as HDTVs with Web connections become more the norm and therefore grow in importance to the Web), 
>> 
> 
> The cable part was just an example of how the perfect hardware configuration can be introduced a problem. It would be quite stupid of me to justify the unfe-area media query solely based on connecting with a RCA cable to a hi-res TV, which is clearly not what I said. But RCA cables, or other types, are indeed used, to connect to TVs which don't have HDMI ports.
> 
>> ...then I would not expect the problem to be relevant enough to content authors to actually get many of them to write special styling rules inside a media query. It seems to me that it is the great increase in pixel area that makes HDTVs a much more practical venue for regular Web pages than SD TVs ever were in the era of WebTV, etc. Without the HD, I wouldn't expect much more authoring for the Web on TVs than we've had already.
>> 
> 
> I repeat my myself, the user agent is running on a media device which doesn't know anything about the screen.

Received on Tuesday, 7 December 2010 18:11:21 UTC