On 2013-07-13 06:17, Glenn Maynard wrote:
Changing orientation is disruptive.
I can hardly imagine how obnoxious Web browsing would be on a mobile
device, if every second page I navigated to decided to flip my device to a
different orientation. This feels like the same sort of misfeature as
allowing pages to resize the browser window: "best viewed in 800x600" (so
we'll force it), "best viewed in portrait" (so we'll force it).
I have a tablet here that does that with a few apps.
And one of them actually does it within itself during certain parts of
the program.
And I can testify it's annoying as hell. For those curious it was a
banking app. And the main menu is forced/locked. But the rest like
account activity etc. is not.
And you can imagine how stupid it is when you have to rotate the tablet
each time you go back to the main menu.
I find responsive and scalable design (so it looks good) on multiple
aspects ratios and multiple PPIs is a must for modern coding.
Please note I have not said orientation at all above, instead I said
aspect ratio as that is the key here. Any device (unless it's square)
has only two aspects.
There really is no up or down. Again this is from experience with my
tablet. It is rectangular and when I pick it up i pick it up. And which
ever edge faces me becomes "down".
And I prefer a wide aspect ratio normally, but for parts with listings I
prefer a narrow aspectratio.
My suggestion is that a webpage or web app signal to the browser what
it's preferred aspect ratio (and resolution) is by using existing CSS
viewport features.
But the browser is under no obligation to enforce anything.
If a rotation lock is really that desired, then the browser MUST provide
a user toggle-able option that is off by default and is named something
along the lines of: Allow Pages/Apps to disable rotation.
But. At the same time a similar option would also be needed called:
Always lock Pages/Apps to "Horizontal" (or Vertical) orientation.
Now I have not looked at many tablets and phones, and certainly not
their option screens, so I have no idea if some or several of them
already have one of these options.
My advise is that if a page or app is aspect limited to simply keep it
aspect limited (use the current CSS stuff to help inform the browser
about that).
Let the user rotate the screen to whatever works best for them. For all
one might know their device might be huge and have a very high PPI, you
can never know.
There are people who prefer to have a monitor rotated 90 degrees, or put
two browser windows side by side.
And as has been said, certain devices may have orientation detection
turned off, or the device may not even have that feature at all.
Myself I think ideally that page rotation locking should be a user
choice and put in the browser context menu so the user can just click
and select if they wish to "lock" the rotation (for that page).
Also if a page really looks better rotated 90 degrees then the user will
quickly figure that out anyway, by *gasp* rotating their display.
And by not allowing web pages/apps to force the orientation we also
encourage better design.
HTML5 + CSS + Javascript is all about being fluid and dynamic and
adaptable and being scalable and fail/fallback gracefully.
It would be silly to take a step backwards from that.
--
Roger "Rescator" Hågensen.
Freelancer - http://www.EmSai.net/
