WINDOW
SIZES ARTICLE, PAGE 4
Some non-solutions
| "Nobody, with the possible exception of
your mother, will change his or her monitor resolution
in order to view your site." |
|
This site best viewed at my desk on my monitor
"This site best viewed at…" …don't do it!
Have you ever changed your monitor resolution in order to accommodate
the design of a particular web site? Changing your resolution takes
quite a few clicks, and often rearranges the icons on your desktop
in a most inconvenient way. Nobody, with the possible exception
of your mother, will change his or her monitor resolution in order
to view your site. These disclaimers are useless at best, and amateurish-looking
at worst.
Redirect-for-resolution
Using a redirect-for-resolution script and separate sets of pages
is a poor solution. You can detect a user's monitor resolution,
but as we have seen, monitor resolution is not the issue. There
are at least three or four common resolution settings at this time,
and within each of these, many possible browser window widths.
Detecting resolution simply does not tell you what size browser
the visitor is using.
But more importantly, any arrangement where several complete sets
of pages need to be maintained is a site-maintenance nightmare,
and should be avoided at all costs.
Some thoughts on the tyranny of the horizontal scrollbar
Horizontal scrollbars: are they the ultimate evil? It's well-known
that users don't like to scroll at all, and are particularly reluctant
to scroll horizontally, and pages should most definitely be arranged
in such a way that the great majority of users don't have to scroll
at all. This is good web design sense.
But amongst web designers, this principle seems to have morphed
into a kind of monster which dictates that if a horizontal scrollbar
even appears, the page is hard to use and the design badly
flawed. This is a questionable philosophy. Consider freeing yourself
from the tyranny of absolutely-never-a-horizontal-scrollbar.
Should the majority of users need to scroll horizontally to see
your page content? Absolutely not. But if a few pixels of horizontal
scrollbar appears at certain widths, it is nothing to lose sleep
over.
The tyranny of printable pages
 |
It was hard enough
getting this page to look
great at lots of different window sizes;
having it be printable was not a given |
On a typical printer designed primarily for 8 ½" x
11" sheets, a web page will print well only if no content
on the page is more than about 630 pixels wide. If this constraint
is placed on a web designer, page-design options are severely limited.
I want to suggest that this constraint is another form of tyranny,
and one which should be overthrown.
I recently designed a site (see the Figure above) which features
three columns of name-and-address data on a page. It took some
doing to get this data to display neatly and properly at the different
browser window sizes, but I managed to achieve it. Soon, however,
the client came complaining to me that the pages didn't print properly;
a little text was cut off on the right-hand side. "This should
print!" he said in patronizing, but patient, tones, as if
to clue me into something I was woefully ignorant about.
Well, if I had been quicker on my feet, I would have told him
that there's no reason a web page should automatically print well
on 8 ½" x 11" paper. They are completely different
media, and the criteria that make a good web page don't necessarily
make that web page printable. If he wants printable pages, that
can certainly be done, but it needs to be one of the goals for
the page before it is designed. An even better alternative is to
provide a separate set of printer-friendly pages.
Continued: Finally,
some solutions --> |
