IE css problems only on win XP

B

Beauregard T. Shagnasty

Beauregard T. Shagnasty replied to hisself:
My monitor is set to my preference. Your page does show a scrollbar with
a window size of 800x600. Why would you want me to change my resolution
(which again is irrelevant) just for your site anyway? And why would you
want to design for one particular size?
http://www.allmyfaqs.com/faq.pl?AnySizeDesign

Here's a screenshot from Opera. Note the browser size in the titlebar,
and the horizontal scrollbar.
http://home.rochester.rr.com/bshagnasty/images/addictiveopera.jpg
 
F

Fredo Vincentis

Beauregard T. Shagnasty said:
Quoth the raven named Fredo Vincentis:
Quoth the raven named Fredo Vincentis:

http://www.addictivemedia.com.au/index_html.php

Thanks for your feedback, Richard. The reason why I emphasize XP is
that I tested the site on IE 6 for Win2000 and it works fine.

No it doesn't.

http://home.rochester.rr.com/bshagnasty/images/addictive.jpg 80KB

Windows 2000 Pro SP4
IE 6 SP1
Tools > Internet Options > Accessibility
[x] Ignore font sizes specified on web pages
(because your font size is too small)
Browser at 800x600
Monitor at 1024x768 (however, irrelevant)

There is a horizontal scrollbar at 800x600. Needs to be about 855
pixels wide before scrollbar disappears.

Sorry, but I don't agree on this one: the site works in 800 x 600. Set your
monitor to the correct resolution and it will work. It works on all the
machines I have got standing right next to me.

My monitor is set to my preference. Your page does show a scrollbar
with a window size of 800x600. Why would you want me to change my
resolution (which again is irrelevant) just for your site anyway? And
why would you want to design for one particular size?
http://www.allmyfaqs.com/faq.pl?AnySizeDesign

Sorry, I didn't mean for you to set your monitor to 800x600 for eternity,
but only to test the site if you do not believe me that it fits.
To create a design that is not expandable was consciously decided for this
website. I generally agree to make a site that fits all browsers (or at
least 800x600 and above), but in order to have complete control over the
design and the position of elements to eachother, my client wanted a 800x60
0 design.
So you think you can control the computers of all your visitors, then.
The visitors will never have a sidebar opened? You think everyone
browses with the window maximized?

I am not saying visitors will never have a scrollbar. I am saying it is
accessible. People can read the content and can navigate.
Are you saying this site is targeted to /only/ young people with
excellent vision? How bold of you.

Yes, this may be bold. But the idea of chosing a target audience is to be
able to address the majority of your users. This particular website is not
dealing with content that has to be accessible by general public, but by a
specific group of people. It is part of a marketing strategy.
 
R

rf

Fredo Vincentis said:
Beauregard T. Shagnasty said:
Quoth the raven named Fredo Vincentis:
Thanks for your feedback, Richard. The reason why I emphasize XP is
that I tested the site on IE 6 for Win2000 and it works fine.

No it doesn't.

http://home.rochester.rr.com/bshagnasty/images/addictive.jpg 80KB

Windows 2000 Pro SP4
IE 6 SP1
Tools > Internet Options > Accessibility
[x] Ignore font sizes specified on web pages
(because your font size is too small)
Browser at 800x600
Monitor at 1024x768 (however, irrelevant)

There is a horizontal scrollbar at 800x600. Needs to be about 855
pixels wide before scrollbar disappears.

Sorry, but I don't agree on this one: the site works in 800 x 600. Set your
monitor to the correct resolution and it will work. It works on all the
machines I have got standing right next to me.

Monitor resolution has nothing to do with canvas size. Telling your audience
to change to a specific screen resolution is, imho, somewhat arrogant.

In fact, multimedia usually implies larger monitors running higher
resolution. I do a bit of CAD and use a similar setup to my mate who does
*lots* of multimedia, that is twin 19 inch at 1600x1200 each. On such a
monitor your font is too small and you try hard to stop me from changing it
and when I do your site breaks.
The site works fine in IE 6 and all other browsers with the stylesheets as
defined. If the css are overwritten, I agree it does not look great, but the
site is accessible and that is what my client requires.

It is not accessible. You have coded the font size in pixels, making it
unaccessible for some of those using IE, unless they choose to ignore your
font size suggestions. Then it breaks.
The font is not too small for the target audience specified.

How do you know? Can you assure us that every one of your target audience
has perfect eyesight? I think not. Even if you impose some sort of
demographic on them, for example they must be less than 30 years old, it
still does not work. The little kid up the road from me has quite bad
eyesight and has her font size set to something like 20 pixels. You are
intentionally discriminating against her. Her dad may be one of your
potential customers and she may say to him "daddy, icky, I can't READ that
site". She probably won't though, she uses Mozilla and would simply roll her
mouse wheel a bit to make the font bigger. It does not break in Mozilla but
it does break in IE.
On a different
website I will use a different font-size,

Why. Why not just always use the font size the viewer has chosen as their
preference? How do you come to the conclusion that *you* know better than
*I* what font size I like. My &deity;, you don't even know what flavour of
*beer* I like [*] :)
but this particular site addresses
the target audience just right.

Evidence? Testimonials? Viewer feedback (*not* customer feedback)?
There are two versions of the site - a flash version and a html version.
index.php runs through a flash-detection and redirects the user accordingly.
So there is a file called index_html and a file called index_flash.

Oh my.

[*] Anything, so long as it's not that stuff brucie imbibes up in QLD or
that stuff with an F on it you guys try to sell out of VIC :)

Cheers
Richard.
 
F

Fredo Vincentis

rf said:
Monitor resolution has nothing to do with canvas size. Telling your audience
to change to a specific screen resolution is, imho, somewhat arrogant.

I meant for Beauregard to change the resolution so he can check it properly,
as it does work on 800 x 600. I don't mean for every user to change it, as
the target audience will be perfectly fine with any resolution higher than
800 x 600.

I am well aware of the fact that monitor resolution has got nothing to do
with canvas size. But a user that reduces the size of his browser window to
less than the 780 x 415 will be accustomed to having a scroll bar.
How do you know? Can you assure us that every one of your target audience
has perfect eyesight? I think not. Even if you impose some sort of
demographic on them, for example they must be less than 30 years old, it
still does not work. The little kid up the road from me has quite bad
eyesight and has her font size set to something like 20 pixels. You are
intentionally discriminating against her. Her dad may be one of your
potential customers and she may say to him "daddy, icky, I can't READ that
site". She probably won't though, she uses Mozilla and would simply roll her
mouse wheel a bit to make the font bigger. It does not break in Mozilla but
it does break in IE.

If you really want to discuss accessibility with me, let's do it. My client
has chosen a particular target audience and this target audience is
addressed in the design and the HTML as required. There are certain groups
of people that fall outside of the target audience. These may be people with
visual, cognitive or other disabilities. The website was created to be
accessible by these people. This may not mean that the design always looks
100%, but the content can be read and the user can navigate through it. A
horizontal scrollbar or a white line somewhere in the design does not rule
out accessibility.

Users with a visual disability that requires them to have larger font-sizes
surely would have their browsers set up to ignore font-sizes set by the
author. Yes, the design does not look 100%, but it is still accessible.

There are certain considerations a web designer has to make when creating a
website. I am sure you know about discussions on font-sizes so I do not have
to lecture you on them. But in the long run we are hovering somewhere
between controlling the design and controlling accessibility. Fulfilling
both is currently not possible. We have to find a middle-way and the way my
client chose was one of them: design for a certain target audience - the
rest of the world will have an accessible yet visually less attractive site.
Why. Why not just always use the font size the viewer has chosen as their
preference? How do you come to the conclusion that *you* know better than
*I* what font size I like.

I am surprised you have to ask this question, but here comes the answer:
some people have their browsers set to a different font-size without even
knowing it. This may have nothing to do with visual impairdness, but simply
a mis-setting in the browser. Setting the font-sizes to fixed pts ensures
that the design looks the way it was planned.
My &deity;, you don't even know what flavour of
*beer* I like [*] :)

You sound like somebody that likes VB?
Evidence? Testimonials? Viewer feedback (*not* customer feedback)?

Market research, business and target audience analysis. I am sorry, but
these information are not for your curious eyes.
 
F

Fredo Vincentis

Beauregard T. Shagnasty said:
Beauregard T. Shagnasty replied to hisself:


Here's a screenshot from Opera. Note the browser size in the titlebar,
and the horizontal scrollbar.
http://home.rochester.rr.com/bshagnasty/images/addictiveopera.jpg

Sorry, but this still hasn't persuaded me. I have set two machines to a
resolution of 800 x 600 and have got Opera 7 installed on both. The website
displays fine in both cases. It seems your 800 pixels are different to mine.
 
R

rf

This particular website is not
dealing with content that has to be accessible by general public, but by a
specific group of people. It is part of a marketing strategy.

Can you or your client personally gaurantee that every one of your specific
group of people has eyesight good enough to read your small text, or rather
a size smaller than they have chosen as their preferred?

Marketing strategy usually includes [suck in the maximum number of people
you can]. You are intentionally excluding some of them.

Cheers
Richard.
 
F

Fredo Vincentis

rf said:
This particular website is not
dealing with content that has to be accessible by general public, but by a
specific group of people. It is part of a marketing strategy.

Can you or your client personally gaurantee that every one of your specific
group of people has eyesight good enough to read your small text, or rather
a size smaller than they have chosen as their preferred?

Marketing strategy usually includes [suck in the maximum number of people
you can]. You are intentionally excluding some of them.

No, a marketing strategy targets individual niches. To successfully promote
a product you create small but specific groups of target audiences and
individually create promotions that address their specific needs. The idea
of building up a target audience is to find common characteristics that are
held by the majority of your users but may exclude multiple minorities.
 
K

kchayka

Fredo said:
some people have their browsers set to a different font-size without even
knowing it. This may have nothing to do with visual impairdness, but simply
a mis-setting in the browser.

And how, pray-tell, do you distinguish between those who intentionally
set this different font size and those who didn't? Or do you think the
more clueful user will just have to figure out how to deal with your
poor choices? I suspect the "back" button will be rather handy in these
cases. ;)
Setting the font-sizes to fixed pts ensures
that the design looks the way it was planned.

At the expense of usability and/or accessibility, no doubt, plus it
frequently ends up as a fragile layout that easily falls apart. You
must be new around here, or you would have already read the myriad of
posts and reference sites regarding the ills of fixed designs, the web
is not DTP, etc. If both you and your client are shooting for form over
function, then your client probably isn't getting their money's worth.
 
W

Whitecrest

kcha-un- said:
If both you and your client are shooting for form over
function, then your client probably isn't getting their money's worth.

The two are not mutually exclusive.
 
F

Fredo Vincentis

kchayka said:
And how, pray-tell, do you distinguish between those who intentionally
set this different font size and those who didn't? Or do you think the
more clueful user will just have to figure out how to deal with your
poor choices? I suspect the "back" button will be rather handy in these
cases. ;)

As I mentioned in the previous post: people with visual impairdness would
surely set their browsers to ignore font settings of websites (or they use
screenreaders).
At the expense of usability and/or accessibility, no doubt, plus it
frequently ends up as a fragile layout that easily falls apart. You
must be new around here, or you would have already read the myriad of
posts and reference sites regarding the ills of fixed designs, the web
is not DTP, etc. If both you and your client are shooting for form over
function, then your client probably isn't getting their money's worth.

Trust me, I know the discussions on accessibility well enough. I have also
studied the opinions on limitations of web design long enough to tell you
that there may be rules but also exceptions to the conception that web
design has to be flexible for different resolutions.

All I wanted in this post was to know whether somebody noticed a difference
between XP browser and others, but it seems you are much keener on starting
a discussion on accessibility/usability and web design which I am happy to
join you for a while:

In my opinion you have to be extremely narrow-minded to take it as a rule
that web design cannot be treated the same as DTP! Of course we are talking
about a different medium here and in the majority of cases I agree that a
flexible design is the appropriate solution. However, in the majority of
cases a flexible design breaks all the rules of graphic design! The
positioning of elements and content to eachother is not just a rough
estimation in which the designer says: "Ah well, I will just bash this image
on to the right of the text, no matter whether it is moved further over in
the course of the website on bigger browser windows". Unfortunately there is
more to a good design. The problem in the web is that a planned design can
be limitated by browser- or client-specific characteristics.

Many Web Developers see their job as an advisory role in which they tell the
graphic designers that everything they have learnt so far is not applicable
to the web and that they have to live with the fact that the design will
move in the long run. I myself am accustomed to telling this to designers.
However, this is not always the correct approach to follow. If a target
audience has been analysed and set to follow certain characteristics, the
design and development of a website can be set up to address these
characteristics.

Which leads us directly into a new discussion and I am sure all of you will
be happy that I address this topic:

SHOULD WEBSITES BE GLOBALLY ACCESSIBLE?
I say yes. This means the content can be read and the site can be navigated.

SHOULD WEBSITES BE GLOBALLY USABLE?
This is an interesting one. So we have established a target audience and we
have addressed their criteria in our website. We say: "Make the site fixed
to 800x600 and 11pt font". Now of course we have left out thousands of other
people that are not happy with the way the site looks, as they were not
planned as part of the target audience. "But the web is for everybody!",
some of you will cry now. "It may be accessible to all of the world, but it
is not usable (or at least it looks shit and it's not fun to interact with).
Shouldn't everybody in the world have the right to receive the same
user-experience?"

The answer is simple: no.

Imagine I would go and complain to TV advertising agencies about their
tampon-advertisements: "I don't feel that you are talking to me in this
advertisement. In fact: watching it bores me!". There is no user-experience
for me in watching TV ads or reading print ads that are not targetted at me.
There is a good reason for that: creating a target audience allows to
address exactly the people you need. And this makes money. MONEY, MONEY,
MONEY, MONEY, MONEY. Everybody else that doesn't bring us money: we are not
interested in whether you enjoy yourselves or not.

Okay, even after writing all this I am sure some of you will say this is bad
web development: everybody should have a good user-experience when visiting
a website. I tell those of you: you are bad marketers and your clients don't
get their money's worth. If you believe it or not: commercial clients are
not there to entertain the world. They are not there to ensure that
everybody likes their website. What they want is for the website to create
money.

Here goes. NOW we've got a discussion going.
 
E

Eric Bohlman

Imagine I would go and complain to TV advertising agencies about their
tampon-advertisements: "I don't feel that you are talking to me in
this advertisement. In fact: watching it bores me!". There is no
user-experience for me in watching TV ads or reading print ads that
are not targetted at me. There is a good reason for that: creating a
target audience allows to address exactly the people you need. And
this makes money. MONEY, MONEY, MONEY, MONEY, MONEY. Everybody else
that doesn't bring us money: we are not interested in whether you
enjoy yourselves or not.

This is a false analogy, because when advertisers talk about a "target
audience" they mean something completely different from what old-school Web
designers talk about when they use that phrase. Advertisers do *not*
define their target audience in terms of their viewing equipment. No TV
advertiser defines his audience as people viewing on a particular brand of
TV set or people viewing on a screen of a given size.

The tampon advertiser defines his target audience as a certain subset of
post-pubescent, pre-menopausal females, *not* as people with 36" Sony
televisions. They realize that people who buy tampons are going to be
viewing their ads in all sorts of different situations, and that they
therefore *must* not try to "optimize" their ads for a particular viewing
situation. If one of the creative types at an ad agency came up with an
idea for a tampon ad that looked just wonderful on a 52" plasma screen but
that was unviewable on a 13" screen, it would be shot down right away.

They don't have to make their tampon ads appeal to *men*, but they *do*
have to make them appeal to the majority of women who see them, regardless
of what kind of equipment they're using.

Web dee-ziners, OTOH, define "target audience" in terms of the type of
computer, monitor, operating system, and Web browser brand and version
that people are using, rather than in terms of what they're interested in.
This is a totally different concept from what advertisers do, and using the
same term for it just leads to muddled thinking. It's a rather geeky
definition, and I don't mean "geeky" in any sort of good sense; I suspect
it comes from the "autistic traits" part of geekiness rather than the "high
intelligence" part.

It's just like the way business schools often teach something they call
"networking." That same term is also used by participants in pyramid-sales
schemes to describe their activities, but that does *not* mean that
business schools are teaching pyramid sales. In both cases, what's going
on is the logical fallacy of equivocation: taking a word or phrase that can
have multiple meanings, using it in two or more senses, and treating each
use of it as equivalent.
 
B

Beauregard T. Shagnasty

Quoth the raven named Eric Bohlman:

The tampon advertiser defines his target audience as a certain subset of
post-pubescent, pre-menopausal females, *not* as people with 36" Sony
televisions. ...

That's exactly what I was going to reply with yesterday, but didn't
bother. Do all those targeted females have perfect vision?

Thanks for the excellent post.
 
F

Fredo Vincentis

Eric Bohlman said:
Web dee-ziners, OTOH, define "target audience" in terms of the type of
computer, monitor, operating system, and Web browser brand and version
that people are using, rather than in terms of what they're interested in.

That is sad that you think that.
 

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