[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Adam Maas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Bandwidth is dirt cheap for commercial sites, and even cheaper for >> non-rural consumers. I can get multi-meg Ethernet for less than a >> T1 cost 4-5 years ago. > > So why load sites down so much that it feels like I'm still on > dialup, eh? ;-) (More importantly: bandwidth is not the > ony resource consumed, and if I've got eighty tabs open in > my browser already, client-CPU-intensive pages slow down even > if I'm not also running GIMP and Mplayer on the same machine.)
Good design will not permit that. Flash is mostly text and shouldn't be huge. Yes people are stupid, but bad designers won't improve by taking away their toys. > > But that's not my main point. > >> It's not about stealing photo's, it's about ensuring that your >> site looks the way you designed it. > > Bzzzt! You _can't_. Not reasonably. You don't know how big my > screen is, how much of it I've given to the browser, or what the > screen resolution is set to. (Worse, you don't know whether I > even have Flash installed in the browser I'm using today -- gee, > I see an awful lot of interesting-sounding links that lead me to > an all black page.) If my screen is a different size then yours, > then either I'll have to scroll horizontally to read anything > (one of the faster ways to get me to give up and go read something > else instead) or leave a big empty space around it. So you test, and design for the average screen (1024x768 these days). Bigger isn't all that much of an issue, and relative sizing can handle a lot of it. > > HTML is designed to make such problems go away. The price? The > designer has to give up the "I Precisely Control Every Exact Detail > Absolutely" mindset and let the browser, and the user, make some > of those decisions. HTML wasn't designed to do more than present text in a vaguely controllable fashion. Everything else has been added in at a later date. And the basic design constraints are in many ways inherited from the early versions. > > PDF has its purpose, and Flash has its purpose, but there are > times -- and on the web, most times are those times -- when you > should let HTML do what HTML was designed to do. True. But product pages and other image intensive applications are what Flash was designed to do. HTML is designed to display text with the occasional image. > > And you _want_ to allow users, especially users with visual impairment > (okay, we're talking photography, which implies a certain level > of vision, but some of us need help with the fine print) who want > to be able to change the font size to read the content that all > the glitz is supposed to make them want to read. Or, for that > matter, to be able to replace a designer's oh so pretty and tasteful > colour combinations with ones where you can actually read the text > without getting a headache. Some designers are idiots. If you've got enough text on the page that it's an issue, you SHOULD be using HTML. text is what it's designed for. > > You don't want to a) make it harder for spiders to navigate the > site (usually), b) make it harder for people using different software > than you expected to navigate the site, c) make it harder for people > to adjust the look to be easier to read, d) make it difficult or > impossible for users to bookmark the pages they want or (a big > deal) send URLs of those pages to friends who may also be interested ... a) is an issue, B) isn't because they're a tint fraction of the market (unless you're an idiot and not testing against Firefox and Safari in addition to IE), c) is one of those things where you may well want to restrict what the user can do and d) is both an issue and not one, depending on applications. > > Hey, a while back the big problem was sites that replaced all of the > perfectly good HTML navigation stuff with Javascript controls that > broke for blind users, security-conscious users, and anyone using > a text browser. Now it's Flash instead, which I'm given to understand > is less of a security issue but is still a problem on the other > counts. I don't think it's mostly about "making it look right > everywhere (even when the user is deparately trying to change it > so they can read it)" most of the time; I think it's about having > to out-glitz the last web designer to get the client's attention, or > marketing folks hung up on what would e pretty in a television > commercial. Simply put, HTML navigation works well for simple sites, but isn't up to handling complex sites where nice little things like drop-down menus help. Javascript and Flash do that very well (and Flash won't have the security issues Javascript has had). Yes, some people do a lot of stupid crap with Flash, but there are quite a few simple and well done flash-based sites. > > -- Glenn > > PS: Yes, I do still use a text browser. If I want to look > something up in a hurry, or instantly strip out accented letters > and asymmetrical quotation marks for ease of copy-and-paste, or > if I'm screen-scraping information to have some script parse, > I fire up trusty old Lynx. It's not what I use for surfing, but > like many other tools it has its uses. And it's annoying when > what should be a useful tool is thwarted for not-very-good reasons. > Frankly, text browsers are completely obsolete. Useful in certain limited circumstances, yes. But obsolete, and they have been for years. I've not found an actual need for a text browser in years, and even my *NIX machines don't have one installed. I don't think you can seriously expect designers to design against a browser with at most a few thousand users. And I seriously doubt that any text browser has more than a few thousand users today (Barring WAP browsers and such on PDA's and Smart Phones). -Adam -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
