[Irl-dean] screen resolution

[Barry McMullin]

On Fri, 4 May 2007, Cormac wrote:

> How do people feel about screen resolution these days?
>
> Obviously the standard for a long time was the 800 * 600 page layout
> format.
>
> Personally, I am still quite happy with that, what do people think?

For me, it is a bad idea to base a design on *any* specific pixel
resolution; rather, the best designs adapt effectively to the
widest possible range of client preferences, specifically
including resolution. Of course, a design may work better or
worse across this range, and there will be *some* limits to the
practical range for particular pages or applications; but I would
generally rank optimisation for "client side adaptability" much
higher than optimisation at any single resolution.

Of course, this directly helps with accessibility; but it helps a
much wider variety of users than that. Small-screen users - PDAs,
phones etc. are an obvious example ... and OK, I guess I am
biased by having just invested in a Nokia N800 "internet tablet".
This is a thing of beauty (at least for a tech junkie like me),
with very high resolution for any "pocket" device; but even it is
still maxed out at 800x600.


> (a) The % using 800*600 is going down (approx 16%) and that if
> 81% have monitors with a higher screen resolution then it is ok
> to have a layout designed for 1024 width.

I don't know where these figures come from (mobile devices
certainly seem to me to be under-represented); and, as Cormac notes,
they anyway neglect users running browsers at anything less than
full screen.  But even more to the point, if you are designing
sites/resources with any significant longevity (and many web
resources turn out to have much longer lifetimes than
"originally" expected) then it is surely a bad idea to make
designs rely in any critical way on any single snapshot in time
of user agent profiles.

Just my 2c ...

Best - Barry.

--
Barry McMullin, Dublin City University
  phone: +353-1-700-5432
  web: http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/~mcmullin/