On 7/22/05, Tom Scales <tscales@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> I can't imagine developing a website for 1280x1024. It may not be unusual
> for this audience, but I'd bet in the real world that 80%+ of computer users
> use 1024x768 or less.
>
> Particularly if they use a laptop.
Personally, when designing a site I try to make it as resolution
independent as possible. It's not just an issue with low res displays,
it can also be an issue with high res as well. I have a 23" widescreen
LCD running at 1920x1200, it drives me nuts when I visit a page that's
only taking up a tiny 800x600 chunk of space on my screen. Usually I
try to pay attention to the width and make sure it will all fit in an
800 pixel wide display but I usually have at least one element in the
page that has a relative width (or a plain undefined width) so that
the content can size to any width.
Related to this, I avoid fixed font sizes and do everything
relatively. My display is great for graphics but I find 12pt (or
smaller) font is too small to read at 100% (so I usually use the zoom
feature in word processing) so browsing a site that's hard coded in a
font size is another annoyance.
Yes, it's a lot harder to do some types of design while keeping this
in mind but I always embraced the idea that the web was built on the
ideas of browser independence and interoperability. The basic
philosophy was that you should explain the STRUCTURE of your document
and then the browser is free to interpret how it wants to render this
structure on the screen.
The other reason I design this way though is that it saves me a lot of
the headaches with how different browsers render the site (granted
IE's abysmal and buggy CSS support pose some problems). I've visited a
lot of sites that have things so finely tuned that if your browser
isn't setup exactly how they expect it to be then you start getting
scroll bars where you shouldn't get scroll bars.
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