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Ed -dot- Hawco -at- acecomm -dot- com wrote:
>
> Sandy Harris said:
> > Try looking at his site with two or more different window sizes. It
> behaves
> > correctly, the HTML flows to properly fill whatever space is available.
> > Compare to brain-dead sites whose "designers" deliver whatever they
> imagine
> > might be appropriate (usually 800 by 600), completely ignoring the actual
> > space available. ...
>
> While I agree with your post, there's one issue I take exception to... I'm
> one of those "brain-dead" designers who designs for a specific resolution,
> and here's why: One of the issues with HTML is the difficulty of creating
> an aesthetically pleasing page in the same manner as printed pages. We all
> like a good layout using lots of white space, but on the web this is
> difficult. One way to simulate this is to use table-based formatting that
> constrains the width of your column.
Methinks you should find another way, e.g. using the stylesheet definitions
of things like lists and paragraphs to create enough whitespace.
> ... NOBODY can comfortably read a paragraph with lines that are 200
> characters long! I constrain my columns so that lines break after a
> comfortable amount of characters (70 or 80,
> sometimes as few as 40) to enable readibilty.
If I hit a site where lines get too long for me, I can narrow my browser
window and fix the problem.
> Who cares if there's a bunch of blank space for those few people who insist
> on using their browsers in "full screen mode"? Space is free!
I don't think it is just a few people, and wasted space on big monitors
is certainly not the whole problem. I cannot tell in advance if I'll ever
visit your site or, assuming I do, how much space I'll want to give it on
my screen.
I sometimes have full 1600 by 1280 screen available on a 21" monitor. If
I've got that, I'd like as much of yout text as reasonable on that screen.
At other times, I've got enough windows around to build a greenhouse,
and the less space I must allocate to you, the happier I'll be.
In either case, simple HTML that the browser can format to fill the
space I give it works fine. Fancy tricks with tables and line-break
tags etc. fail in both cases and leave me cursing the designer.
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