design versus screen size

[Doom9]

I know I don't have a joe average screen, and there are sites that prefer to limit the content area by tables, frames or CSS. I've never liked that approach and here's why not. This is just an example of how sites can look on the 3007FWP:

[img=http://img485.imageshack.us/img485/5184/sample19nt.th.gif] (http://img485.imageshack.us/my.php?image=sample19nt.gif)

[SeeMoreDigital]

Jeez that really does look awful :eek:

I notice you're using FireFox.... Does the same happen in IE6?


Cheers

[Doom9]

Does the same happen in IE6?Of course.. these days it isn't like pages look almost the same in almost every instance.. the only thing I hate about Firefox (well two things really.. the other is unloading part of the memory even when you tell it not to.. then switching to FF takes more time than restarting the program and loading all tabs again) is that it doesn't wrap url links and creates horizontally scrollable pages instead.

[scharfis_brain]

hehe. use Opera and its zoom feature!
use 200% or 300% zoom and you'll get zoomed text and images unlike other browser that just increase the text size.

[SeeMoreDigital]

Thanks for the confirmation.

I was interested because I read in a newspaper article a few weeks ago, that very few businesses had configured their web sites to run/display correctly on non IE web browsers.


Cheers

[Soulhunter]

hehe. use Opera and its zoom feature!
use 200% or 300% zoom and you'll get zoomed text and images unlike other browser that just increase the text size.
There are similar plugins for FireFox... ^^

I use colorzilla (http://www.iosart.com/firefox/colorzilla/) <- clorpicker + zoom function!


Bye

[zilog jones]

Some sites are bad enough when viewed at 1280x1024, never mind 2560x1600 ^_^
The fatal flaw in websites like that is usually thanks to the use of HTML tables with widths set in pixels. It means they're only designed to look right at one resolution, and that's usually 1024x768. Go lower than that and you end up having to scroll across the screen, and go higher and you end up with a stupid little narrow column.

They could percentages for the widths instead, but it requires more effort to design it so stuff like menu bars and banners don't get messed up - and then you end up with the risk of having everything just down sides of tables (if text or pictures are aligned to the left or right) and big gaps inbetween. It's pretty hard to design a website suitable for all sizes if you want it to look in any way sophisticated...

[Doobie]

That is one reason why I don't want a wide-screen monitor.

[DryFire]

I have two 2005fpw's I fliped one length wise for easier reading with sites like that.

though with a 30" monitor it probably woldn't help too much.

[cypher_soundz]

i get the same on a lot of sites just using a high resolution 4:3 monitor.

@doom9 You should switch to thunderbird to :P :D

Regards
cyph

[Doom9]

@doom9 You should switch to thunderbird to :PI have good reasons not to.. I check it with every major release, and it's still lacking. The biggest miss is an outbox.. not the sorry plugin excuses you get for it.. an outbox built into the main program. If you have so many accounts like I do, and cannot count on servers to be always available, and like to work offline, there's simply no alternative (the "send later box" is utter crap.. when I press the send button I want to go the mail to go out at the earliest convenience and not have to ever worry about it again). Prior to Thunderbird 1.5, their handling of multiple outgoing accounts was also sorely lacking. I've gone the usual way, made my feature requests, gave long explanations on how current functionality, with very few changes could be turned into what I (and I suspect many others that work the same way.. you'll find the term outbox creeping up quite a lot) need, and why such a feature makes sense.. but I guess since I use windows my argumentation, no matter how good it may be, is futile.. I'm just a stupid windows user who doesn't know shit anyway.

[cypher_soundz]

bah :/

That makes sense, i must admit i never even noticed no outbox :) but as you must of guessed i dont use multiple accounts :)

It did take me a whiel to switch over even using 1 mail account due to the lack of import / export features.

also there is no feature for amalgamating messages.

Regards
cyph

[zilog jones]

Have you tried Opera for e-mail? It has an Outbox for starters, and I use it with 2 IMAP accounts and a POP3 account (Gmail) with no problems. It's a bit annoying that there's no dedicated inbox/sent mail folders for POP accounts but it's very easy to make filters for them.

I used Thunderbird as some research for my friend's HCI project in college, and found it quite lacking in comparison. I really hate Firefox's and Thunderbird's over-relying on external plugins for any sort of decent functionality...

[ppera2]

I know I don't have a joe average screen, and there are sites that prefer to limit the content area by tables, frames or CSS. I've never liked that approach and here's why not. This is just an example of how sites can look ....

Well, solution is simple: decrease browser's window size on large monitors :)

I recently redesigned my old hardware site's start page to look better and limited it's width. Some things just can't be solved by free html positioning, and if you start to use absolute/relative positioning it actually requires limiting at least width. Otherwise it will look chaotic, or with holes in middle if we positoning to edges.
Scaling in Opera is good idea, maybe they should implement independent horizontal/vertical scaling, so we can squize vertically long pages to fill and fit at once on screen on hi-res monitors :D

[DeepDVD]

Some sites rent the unused space to companies use them to link to their sites. It's very annoying if you click between non-fullscreen-browser-windows and click onto that space.

In a preview of the new IE7 beta their was an example of how to zoom on exactly that type of sites. An idea to think about would be a autozoom function w/out zooming into the nonresizable things like pictures or banners in GIF-format.

[Shinigami-Sama]

Some sites are bad enough when viewed at 1280x1024, never mind 2560x1600 ^_^
The fatal flaw in websites like that is usually thanks to the use of HTML tables with widths set in pixels. It means they're only designed to look right at one resolution, and that's usually 1024x768. Go lower than that and you end up having to scroll across the screen, and go higher and you end up with a stupid little narrow column.
800 wide
<.<

but I do agree, lots of sites don't like to make it go above, nor below, cause most people seems to user *X768/800/1024, mines 800 wide because thats how wide the banner is, and thats all I need, anymore and I"m not sure how to get the rest of the table to align proporly, I'm not that good at html/php yet to even think about redesigning it yet, but doom, thats what you get for droping a few paychecks on a moni :P