[Irl-dean] screen resolution

[Ross Geoghegan]

This might be of interest
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/switchymclayout/

Relies on JS to find user agents screen size, if no JS - fluid layout
applied. Then you are into the whole text-size vs. page zoom debate. It's
not an easy one to resolve...
I see (visual) designers in general are moving to 2/3 1/3 900px wide layouts
that wrap the 1/3 div if res is smaller. 

Ross

-----Original Message-----
From: irl-dean-admin at list.eeng.dcu.ie
[mailto:irl-dean-admin at list.eeng.dcu.ie] On Behalf Of Barry McMullin
Sent: 04 May 2007 14:38
To: irl-dean at list.eeng.dcu.ie
Cc: Barry McMullin
Subject: Re: [Irl-dean] screen resolution

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/

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