On 06/07/01 01:06 (GMT+0200) Jan Brasna apparently typed:
> Felix Miata wrote:
>> A web browser viewport is a naturally fluid and adaptable
>> space that most designers refuse to or don't know to embrace.
> You see it only from the academic/technical/purist point of view.
Hardly. I'm a user. I have to deal with what I find looking for
information on the web. On most CSS-styled sites, I find the easiest way
is View -> Page Style -> No Style. It's quite boring, but text other
than (Google) iframes (and who needs them) is never illegible, hidden or
overlapping that way.
> Part
> of the content, message, presentation is the way how it is presented,
It may or may not be. There's typically little or nothing that graphics
can offer to improve the communication of the Congressional Record or
Shakespeare's fiction. A designer typically will think so regardless
whether it really does or not.
> be
> it the layout, proportions between the parts of content serving
> usability and IA needs or raster elements accompanying those. I hope you
> really do not treat graphics and design as the same, because it is not
> the same.
Design shouldn't interfere with access to the content. Graphics can
distract, particularly background images. The design itself, independant
of graphics, has similar power.
>> fluid web designs rather than artificially constrained print designs
>> hosted on the web.
> Could you try to think more about that, not only that superficially?
It's precisely due to the current implementations of graphics on the web
that I expect little from them. I find no worse a randy scaled up image
than an image too small to discern details in. Because they're generally
equally bad, they might as well be scaled so that the physical
relationships in the overall design can be preserved.
By definition, half the people who see at all have poorer than average
vision. Who are your 12px in body web pages for, only those above 40%?
60%? 80%? More? Why not everybody?
>> grand total of 0 elements sized in px or absolute units.
> Sizing is one thing, I never mentioned there's a problem with relative
> sizing of elements. The issue I'm talking about is the broken relation
> between those sized elements and the possibility of having a raster
> object inside them which isn't scaled.
The intended space and thus the general relationship can be preserved
even when the object absolutely must be displayed at its intrinsic size.
It'll just need a framing/padding/border that will vary instead of
having an entire page inaccessibly locked into a monolithic print media
view.
> This is what I thought the first time I saw your screenshots a few years
> ago
Few years? Which screenshots were those?
> - your system's DPI
That's a misspelling. It should be systems' DPI. I have a double digit
number of functional systems represented by considerably more than that
number of operating system versions, several of which I frequently
switch DPI on for analysis, and one of which I often run at two or more
different DPI at one time.
> is ill from my point of view because the system
> is not ready to scale everything
Some systems are, and others are not. OS/2 can be pretty bad. Doze XP is
better, but not good. Recent Linux desktops may be the best (still no
Mac), but leave plenty to be desired, mostly the benefits of universal
SVG that isn't ready for prime time yet.
> - it only enlarges the text but leaves
> the rest untouched - for me the system is unusable then; the ergonomics
> is gone. And it's the same on the web:
If you can't read it, nothing else matters. Anything that purports to
improve upon illegibly small text is illusion.
> Accessibility is not about having big text. It is about universal needs.
Exactly. Anyone and everyone is provided an absence of artificial
limitations to access on an "accessible" page. When an IE user who
requires 14pt text in order to read without difficulty encounters a
'body {font-size: 76%}' page, his text resizer widget it unable to
compensate for the artificial limitation and restore the size to his
14pt requirement with IE's resizer widget.
> Why is your need of having everything fluid without the relation to the
> fixed (due to the DPI) rest
"Fixed rest"? Maybe you should try Linux. Several distros provide live
CD's, so you need not install it to try it.
> more important than my need of having
> everything scaled in the same ratio with the layout keeping the same
> proportions?
How can proportions be maintained regardless of user text size
requirements with the artificial constraint of fixed width? Don't your
user needs count for anything? When everything is sized in em,
proportions can be maintained through a wide range of text size and
viewport size combinations. Your 3 columns constrained to a combined
total of 760px width eventually run out of room for usable line lengths
as text size is increased. Where's the proportion, or sense, in that,
particularly when that 760px is only taking up ~6.5" width on a ~21"
wide 25" 2560x1600) display I bought in order that all things would be
sufficiently large enough that I can see, but barely 80% of the
physical width a 15.4" laptop user @ 1280x800 gets from 760px?
--
"If you confess with your mouth, 'Jesus is Lord', and believe in
your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved."
Romans 3:23 NIV
Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409
Felix Miata *** http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/
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