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When will 1024x768 Replace 800x600 for Web Design?
Dr.X asks: "It seems as users get bigger and better monitors and video cards, the standard for web resolution is slowly approaching 1024. There is a fairly in depth answer over at Google stating that we are likely to be safe at 800x600 but when will we hit 1024 as the standard. What's Slashdot's opinion?"
I have a fairly recent computer, I may have a bigger screen then 800x600, however I do not browse with the window filling the whole screen, I would hope that web designers (including myself) continue to make well designs that work at a smaller resolution.
It's just as much a question of:
- when PHB's stop being paranoid about not reaching 0.2% of their possible clients
- when web designers start thinking out of the box, quite literally
Technically, pages can be made to scale, but it is not perfect. What is missing is the option to scale to a certain width and then stop. I usually have my browser about 1100-1200pixels wide when surfing. At 1600, scalable sites seem to wither. A design for a certain width (be it 800 or 1600) may technically scale, aestetically it won't. I haven't found a solution for it either, except to limit the width. There's no css for scale to 1200 and fix it at wider screens.
the pun is mightier than the sword
I agree, and I've noticed lately that many major sites have been redesigned for scaling e.g. oracle.com. IBM.com still constrains their layout to a fixed resolution though.
I can guess why some people would still want to design fixed-resolution sites. Some of these web-designers probably come from a print background, and as a result of their training, they are stuck with a lot of print-specific notions that are admittedly hard to discard.
I have to concede that designing for a fixed resolution is simply easier in most cases (especially if you use a lot of bitmaps and rely on oldskool 1-px tricks to achieve your layout). Fixed resolutions give you absolute coordinates, which are just more convenient to work with. To some extent, they also help to ensure your layout's robustness across browsers (e.g. a width="30%" doesn't always give you 30% in all browsers) The layout at wolfram.com, for instance, would have been more difficult to achieve using scalable elements.
CSS solves a big part of the problem by giving you a level of control that allows for precision layout, but unfortunately some elements like bitmaps just don't scale (and SVG isn't widespread yet).
The other (albeit inadvertent) benefit of contraining the size of a page to a lowest-common-denominator fixed resolution like 640x480, is that it keeps the text-width small for the majority of people who run at higher resolutions. The advantage of doing this is the same as the advantage of having columns: studies have shown that shorter text-widths make for higher readability.
Having said that, I prefer scalable-resolution websites myself.
At the end of the day, it's about achieving a balance between function and form. And it's really really hard to do, so most people choose one or the other. Props to you if you can do both.
One of my most important clients have been at 1024+ for some (7+) years, however they also have machines accessing at 640 and 800.
Worse yet most of the high resolution machines are stuck at Netscape 4.7 and color depth of 256.
We decided years ago to fore go glitz for operability, design from the start for backward compatibility and we've done some nice looking stuff that has stood the test of time.
Flash, Java-apps and the like are blocks that have to be replaced and don't work for everyone.
Designing for 800 or less means that screens should less likely to become over saturated with 'content' and hence easier to read on a screen.
The answer is to know you audience and be smart (not clever) about who you think you can discard.
Some fool slapped me up and locked my browser the other day for having javascript enabled while visiting his site, not even giving me contact information. Eventually after 1 1/2 hours of phone calls I got it, and his boss, and access restored for the paying customers of the company.
Be careful the web is a communications medium, not a game console (parts of the net and web can be, but the standard is communications).
Having standardized sizes matters to develop a universally usable site. It's not just a marketing ploy; in many cases, it's a legal requirement. Before you complain about how little it matters and demand that people be flexible, consider the following:
First, a site must be attractive. You may be a purist who still thinks that pretty pictures and good design isn't necessary if you present enough information, but you'd be wrong. Unfortunately, people still judge things by their looks. Even if you've presented your information in such a way as to make it extraordinarily easy to use and navigate, many people will never know that. Often, they'll see that your site looks like crap and figure your business is run the same way. Imagine yourself in the lobby of a company you're considering doing business with. Sure, the walls are sound and the furniture doesn't have holes in it. But if everything is cheap white plastic and particleboard, you're going to wonder if this company isn't just some fly-by-night operation. Thus, having an attractive site is important.
Second, the World Wide Web Consortium has very specific requirements for a page to be "usable". What happens if you don't do it there way? Well, you can be sued, for one thing. Also, your company will not be allowed to do business with the government, as you are most likely not in compliance with section 508, the same series of regulations that require wheelchair access, braille, and other accessibility assists for those with disabilities.
Third, you've got to make your site usable. Usability is not the same as accessibility. A 100% accessible site can be 99% unusable if it isn't clear what a user should do, how they should navigate, etc. Just because you've got braille on all of your stairways doesn't mean your users will know what floor to hit if you don't have a building directory somewhere, easy to find and easy to read. As such, it's important to make sure any idiot can navigate your site with ease. Do user testing. Record the sessions. Don't focus so much on what your users say, so much as what they do. I once had a user try to click on something that wasn't a link (but that could have been), then tell me he "should've known better"... but he didn't. (Naturally, it was a link an hour later.) ;-)
Once you've established that your site has to be cleanly and professionally designed, accessible and usable, you now have to make sure none of these elements breaks as you move from machine to machine, browser to browser, and platform to platform. You'll quickly notice that suddenly, you can't make your site scale as much as you want. You see that smoothly-flowing text on a 800x600 screen looks hopelessly cluttered on a 640x480 screen and ridiculously wide, yet short on a 1024x768 screen. You begin to develop visual guides that will work with lower monitor resolutions, yet still look professional on the larger screens. Your designers produce a style guide that begins to define specific column widths and template sizes. And you notice... that the web really isn't as scalable as you thought it was.
What the standard is matters because, if you want to be taken seriously or treated professionally, you had damn well make sure that your site is attractive, accessible, and usable. If not, you'll watch all of your competition march on by, taking your audience with it, regardless of whether you're out to make money or not. If your audience sees that someone else offers the same thing you do, but it's nicer and easier to use, they're going to go see that someone else, and that will be that. You had better take into account what resolutions your users have at their disposal, or your sites will cease to exist.
There are still LOT's of users (specially on companies) who use 800x600 resollutions, and that will be the standard until nobody uses that...
Mind Booster Noori
TV companies don't have to worry about whether viewers have 14-inch or 32-inch screens; the picture just scales to fit.
It should be this way with web-sites too.
Mind you, my TV is the wrong shape nowadays - 4/3 just doesn't work too well with 16/9 broadcasts. SWMBO feels ripped off if parts of the screen are blank, so she always chooses Pan & Scan. I don't like the edges being cropped so I prefer Letterbox.
Must upgrade one of these days...
Oh, how convenient: a theory about God that doesn't involve looking through a telescope.
Even slashdot? I run 1280x1024 and with slashdot maximized I find it very difficult to scan back to the beginning of the line. I never maximize my web browser for this reason, there's still a lot of sites out there which are designed for no particular resolution and will scale the width of the text up to whatever you set the browser window at.
One thing that bothers me a fair bit is the number of sites that use javascript to detect the *screen* resolution instead of the size of your browser. Yes I might have a large screen, but I don't want my browser to be taking up all the space, I find it quite handy being able to use the screen estate round my browser to monitor other things (eg downloads).
I always hope that one day HTML will return to what it once was - a set of hints about how to display the page, the actual display was up to the browser. So many sites these days expect the page to be rendered pixel-perfect which is completely against the original ideas of HTML.
I kind of know what you mean, but to tell the truth, I don't want something that scales up to my resolution and looks huge on the screen (like a pdf does with the new windows viewer - yuk.) Clever use of CSS should allow more content to show when more space is available - rather than just making the existing content bigger.
That's all very well but 2 things..
1. Images don't scale, clients often want nice big branding
2. Clients will often override the designers wishes. Fixed width sites are still pretty popular.
Having said that, I'm happy with the minimum target res being 800*600. I don't like browsing full screen and I often nearly have to do that already. The vast majority of users still browse on a PC, handheld devices can force reorganisation of the layout, like Opera for Symbian does.
Just because I'm running a high screen resolution doesn't mean that I'm running my browser at full screen. I happen to like 1024x768 on my tiny 15" screen at work and I don't want to have to maximize just to see everything. Also, these are windows so they can be any size. If I want to make my browser 865x550, I can do that. The website should adjust to my window size, not the other way around.
Man... I run at 1600 x 1200 on a 17" sony trinitron monitor and can't wait to pick up a nice 21" viewsonic and run higher rez... Granted it is a pain when I visit web sites that insist on using tiny fonts, although I did see a really cool flash site that scaled everything to fit into whatever window you had opened, and I could read it great even when I had it scaled down small... I do a tonne of 3D work and I love my real estate. At work I am on three 21" viewsonics maxed out at 1900 x 1600 and always use all three for one application. Granted I have a system that can handle it and I am not losing my eye sight just yet...
On the other hand, my mother has difficulty seeing, due to cataracs, and she browses and does banking on a 800 X 600 laptop. So for private use hi res is something you set for web space the lowest common denominator is your best bet.
I am sure within a few years we will have higer res as standard, but again as more boomers lose their sight, sites with easier to read text will do better. I can see a standard of higher res but then we will all have to use H1 for paragraph text.
flinging poop since 1969
The beautiful part of CSS is that it allows you to use mathematics to scale. If I want the font size to be proportional to the screen size (for example, 10px at 1024x768 - 8px on 800x600), I can just use something like: (Yes, I am aware that this will not work, but its just for example purposes only)
and it will scale accordingly.
Frink: Nice try floyd, but you were designed for scrubbing, and scrubbing is what you shall do.
The Mac interface is clumsy for multitasking because you can only access the menu of a single application at a time. If the user has to learn all the hotkeys for their applications just to switch apps and pick a menu item efficiently, well that makes FVWM good for multitasking too!
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
And the final problem is that while CSS is great and cooks your breakfast too, there are still many browsers in use which don't fully support the latest standards. Sorry, but I ain't gonna alienate a good segment of my customers in order to use the latest standards, no matter how good they are.
:) (hey, if your website is unreadable in links or requires javascript/java/flash/etc to navigate, you havent done your fucking job)
And that's said as someone who does the website of a small venture in his free time - just like you said, I'm not a "real" web designer. But I like to think I do a better job than many of these so-called professionals.
> Your work habits are the result of poor interface design in the Windows UI. Windows lends itself toward single tasking (one program full screen, others in the background in the taskbar).
I really couldn't disagree more. The fact of the matter is your eyes can only look at one thing at a time. No matter how talented you are your eyes work as a pair. Just try looking at this post and something else at the same time. Can't do it.
So why on earth would you want your monitor to display more things than you can physically look at? Unless you're looking back and forth comparing two things, or need a status monitor up for something, it makes no sense at all. I work at 1152x864 at work and 1600x1200 at home, 22" flat screen CRT @ 85hz. I invested in this monitor to display the thing my eyes are looking at in large crystal clear, fatigue-free beauty. Everything I do is almost ALWAYS maximized. You don't need to see an inactive window in the background to know it's there. The keyboard can switch you around the windows just as fast as the mouse. So again, why on earth would I want to display stuff that my eyes can't look at? (Which also makes me scroll around more in the thing I AM looking at.)
Eyes do NOT multitask.
At the risk of sounding trollish, I'll suggest 3 main reasons people display so many windows at once:
1 - They can't remember what the heck they've got open if they can't see it (the 1" taskbar presence isn't enough)
2 - they aren't good at using the keyboard to jump between between windows so they need to keep the windows arranged for clicking between them.
3 - To look much busier and more impressive at work.
Again a monitor is a visual display and eyes do not multitask.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
You obviously have never designed any sort of commercial website. Sure, it's nice to be a preachy, didactic Slashdotter and complain about lack of standards, but a true commercial venture knows that you can't always rely on customers to know what they're doing, you can't rely on any consistency in the technology they use, and you can't rely on smart design to catch the user's eye.
Javascript is not a bad thing at all, but clearly is often used in bad ways. But you don't advocate taking guns away from the police just because they can be bad. It's useful for taking the strain off the server by doing client side validation.
Frames aren't always evil either. In fact, I use Squirrelmail most of the time - a very common PHP based IMAP webmail system, and the whole damn thing is in frames by default. I love it.
Many Slashdotters use Gmail now, and I'd like to point out that it's about 99% javascript based. Doesn't automatically make it bad, does it?
Opening a second window is OFTEN the preferred behavior. Sites that bring up massive search results - like an ebay type site, or an e-commerce site, or even a personals site like match.com, might prefer opening individual windows.
I can agree with some of what you say: no site should be fully plugin based, and that Flash, while cool, is contributing to the deterioration of the internet, and that horizontal scrolling is the work of the devil. But the rest of your points make you sound too much like a propagandized Slashdot standards fanboy who is hip to the latest trends of XML.