Maximum safe width for web pages?

[Wÿrm]

So, if you can point me to a good way to do the above goals WITHOUT resizing
the thumbnails, and allowing different sizes (extremely different sizes!)
that still looks good, then I will thank you. Otherwise, I'm kinda getting
tired of the whole "let it wrap, dude" argument. Sorry if that's rude.

It's not rude Just that I do not see why you insist stubbornly that you
have to specify X columns instead of letting things wrap where they want

Point is, when you do it by specifying X columns, you already have, in a
way, "container" of size X * Y where you have thumbnail. Y size might not be
"locked" but X size surely is. So only reason to NOT use thumbnails that
wrap to canvas width, would be that you have X columns that do not "Line
up". Meaning, say that 3 colums each having different height image
thumbnails that do not line horizontally with other columns.

If your images with X column do line up horizontally across all columns you
have (some kind of grid), you then already DO have containers for each
image. And when you do have those containers, their sizes (for column width
and height) are certain maximum thumbnail sizes, no?

If that is the case, why not put each thumbnail to it's own container like
in Lauri's example it was done. Each thumbnail can be any size up to
containers Width/height, and when those containers are floated they happily
wrap?

Maybe I do not understand your problem correctly though. But what I saw from
your page, your images did "line up" horizontally there across columns, are
you planning to make them not line up horizontally?

 

[Mabden]

It's not rude Just that I do not see why you insist stubbornly that you
have to specify X columns instead of letting things wrap where they want

Point is, when you do it by specifying X columns, you already have, in a
way, "container" of size X * Y where you have thumbnail. Y size might not be
"locked" but X size surely is. So only reason to NOT use thumbnails that
wrap to canvas width, would be that you have X columns that do not "Line
up". Meaning, say that 3 colums each having different height image
thumbnails that do not line horizontally with other columns.

If your images with X column do line up horizontally across all columns you
have (some kind of grid), you then already DO have containers for each
image. And when you do have those containers, their sizes (for column width
and height) are certain maximum thumbnail sizes, no?

If that is the case, why not put each thumbnail to it's own container like
in Lauri's example it was done. Each thumbnail can be any size up to
containers Width/height, and when those containers are floated they happily
wrap?

Maybe I do not understand your problem correctly though. But what I saw from
your page, your images did "line up" horizontally there across columns, are
you planning to make them not line up horizontally?

Yes, I agree with everyone that my particular page would not be harmed by
allowing wrapping. Once again, I made my page look nice, by making each
thumbnail the same size and cropping and resizing them to make a nice
looking page.

My code is made for a generic, "I don't know what I'm doing" kind of person
to drop their pic into a directory, some with thumbnails, some without, and
have it look good anyways. I don't have pics of the old "bad pages" but try
it yourself. Put a bunch of very different sized images on a page and move
around the browser width & height. In some combinations they look ugly.
Especially on 640 monitors.


I HAD to make my page look nice, as I am the only resource for most of those
sharks statues, since all the official sites stopped posting them. We can
only hope someone is keeping the Bunnies of Michigan going...

<plug>
15 minutes of fame moment
I'm on this page ... way down at the bottom:
http://www.jr.co.il/hotsites/pictures.htm
</plug>

 

[Whitecrest]

Weren't we discussing floating thumbnails? Your link is a hard 800px
page, with three thumbs per row. At less than 800, you must scroll,
and at 1024 there's all this extra space at the right.
Why do you think my page is crap and this premierphotographer is not?

I did NOT say your page WAS crap, I said it "LOOKED" like crap compared
to the second example.

When I look at both pages next to each other, yours, with the floating
columns, and perfect html... is great when displayed to all the people
in this newsgroup. And everyone high-fives each other as we all admire
how great your page works, and can be seen by anyone... Oh sure, it
shows the mastery of HTML and CSS. But it looks "bla" Nothing there
nothing exciting, (and especially important to this specific example)
nothing showing your artistic talents, which is the most important thing
for a photographer.

Everyone goes to the other site and buys pictures because the site
"looks" better, and to many people think looks good/cool = professional.
(it makes no difference if it is professional or not, it looks
professional) So your site will draw all the technical savvy people and
they will all say ohh-ahhh. My example will sell pictures. Welcome to
the real world where all that nasty design stuff really does matter..

I 'spose so.

Thats the great thing about the Internet, It is big enough for both
kinds of sites, because some people like a technical savvy site, some
like nicely designed sites. (no the two are NOT mutually exclusive in
theory, but in practice, they tend to be) Everyone gets what they want.
(Except the purest who still cant figure out why their technically
correct boring site isn't producing)

This is not to say that you could not take your page and make it more
appealing, and still keep your floating thumbs. But as displayed, it
looks like crap compared to the other example.

 

[Whitecrest]

Plus, I hadn't been to this wonderfully helpful newsgroup to discover tips
and tricks from all you wonderful experts.

This group has great ideas, they are technically savvy, and you can get
an answer for just about anything. (But the really good HTML/CSS guys
suck at design.)

 

[Whitecrest]

It's not rude Just that I do not see why you insist stubbornly that you
have to specify X columns instead of letting things wrap where they want

Because it looks like crap wrapped.

Point is...

No the point is, it looks like crap that way.

 

[Beauregard T. Shagnasty]

Quoth the raven named Whitecrest:

(e-mail address removed) says...

I did NOT say your page WAS crap, I said it "LOOKED" like crap
compared to the second example.

Oh, ok. I understand. Being crap and looking like crap can be two
different things.

When I look at both pages next to each other, yours, with the
floating columns, and perfect html... is great when displayed to
all the people in this newsgroup. And everyone high-fives each
other as we all admire how great your page works, and can be seen
by anyone... Oh sure, it shows the mastery of HTML and CSS.

Mastery... aahhhh...

But it looks "bla" Nothing there nothing exciting, (and
especially important to this specific example) nothing showing your
artistic talents, which is the most important thing for a
photographer.

You've guessed it. I don't have any artistic talents. I am not a
dee-zyner [dee-zygner? how do you spell that?] and not a professional
photographer either. The page is just a bunch of snapshots.

Everyone goes to the other site and buys pictures because the site
"looks" better, and to many people think looks good/cool =
professional. (it makes no difference if it is professional or not,
it looks professional) So your site will draw all the technical
savvy people and they will all say ohh-ahhh. My example will sell
pictures. Welcome to the real world where all that nasty design
stuff really does matter..

You've based your critique on whether on not the two sites will sell
photographs. That's cool, but odd since one is not selling anything.
....

This is not to say that you could not take your page and make it
more appealing, and still keep your floating thumbs. But as
displayed, it looks like crap compared to the other example.

What would you recommend for a bunch of low-res snapshots? To make it
not crap?

 

[Wÿrm]

No the point is, it looks like crap that way.

bullshit and you know it SHITEcrest. So stop trolling around. Oh, and don't
bother to reply. I'm getting tired to your trollings, so you have now small
special place in killfile for a week or two, maybe in that time you stop
arguing against everything just because you wanna argue and disagree.

 

[Wÿrm]

You've based your critique on whether on not the two sites will sell
photographs. That's cool, but odd since one is not selling anything.

our arguing troll Whitecrest has this little illusion about everything
being/must be commercial and sell That's why he wants everything have
pretty and flashy graphics...

 

[Lauri Raittila]

Because, to me, it looks like crap when compared to this site.

http://www.premierphotographer.com/

That has nothing to do with this, it would be very easy make
http://www.premierphotographer.com so that it wouldn't require fixed
width. It's true that it looks better, but that is irrelevant, as you we
weren't talking about how things are laid out, not what they should look.

 

[Lauri Raittila]

You are right, that site works well, and it crossed two monitors very well.

Thats why I give the url.

So, if you can point me to a good way to do the above goals WITHOUT resizing
the thumbnails, and allowing different sizes (extremely different sizes!)
that still looks good, then I will thank you. Otherwise, I'm kinda getting
tired of the whole "let it wrap, dude" argument. Sorry if that's rude.

Take max width and max height of measures of thumbnails in a folder, and
use them as width and height of outer box (and do this again for each
folder). I don't think it would be very hard to do that. The problem is
that if thumbnail is extra big (like 500px*300px), you may only get one
on each line, and waste lots of space. OTOH, you do same with fixed cols.

Fixed cols is sometimes better if there is huge difference in heights of
thumbnails, as one 300px heigh thumbnail requires all boxes to be 300px
tall in flowing gallery. OTOH using flowing gallery, you can allow very
different widths, and save huge amount of space, as in flowing callery,
you don't have fixed number of columns. Someone posted nice example about
this during last year, I think.

I would say that extremily wide (panorama) pictures are much more common
than extreamily high photos.

 

[Beauregard T. Shagnasty]

Quoth the raven named Whitecrest:

http://www.premierphotographer.com/

Whilst looking at this, I noticed that there are waterfalls at:

Buskill Falls, Pa.

That should be: Bushkill Falls.

Nice place; been there many times.

 

[Mabden]

Quoth the raven named Whitecrest:


Whilst looking at this, I noticed that there are waterfalls at:

Buskill Falls, Pa.

That should be: Bushkill Falls.

Nice place; been there many times.

If only it were named after a(n) historical event...

 

[Mabden]

Fixed cols is sometimes better if there is huge difference in heights of
thumbnails, as one 300px heigh thumbnail requires all boxes to be 300px
tall in flowing gallery. OTOH using flowing gallery, you can allow very
different widths, and save huge amount of space, as in flowing callery,
you don't have fixed number of columns. Someone posted nice example about
this during last year, I think.

I would say that extremily wide (panorama) pictures are much more common
than extreamily high photos.

I think I'm getting the idea across, finally. Yes, fixed columns worked
better for me when, in the beginning of the design, I found the thumbnails
to be different sizes. When I later resized them, I still remembered my
first experience and left in the fixed columns because the page is supposed
to be REUSED by other people who are not experienced coders or graphics
designers, but just people who want to show some pics on the "interweb".

This site is not to sell things (Whitecrest!) so it doesn't need to be
especially "commercial". But it is the site with the most Shark Statues, so
I wanted it to look OK. When I read about people viewing the page in 640 I
realized my site wouldn't be so viewable, so I made it accept fewer columns.

Now I wonder if I should make it viewable by people with (excessively) large
widths. I con't (typo but I like it: can't + don't = con't) see anyway to do
that without resorting to cookies, and even then you may change your layout
between sessions.

 

[Lauri Raittila]

Now I wonder if I should make it viewable by people with (excessively) large
widths. I con't (typo but I like it: can't + don't = con't) see anyway to do
that without resorting to cookies, and even then you may change your layout
between sessions.

Yes. Only way to get it fit to big and small windows is to make it flow.

 

[Mabden]

Yes. Only way to get it fit to big and small windows is to make it flow.

I'm NOT going to make it flow. Perhaps I've been unclear on that. It will
not happen. Period.

Go with the flow,

 

[Lauri Raittila]

I'm NOT going to make it flow. Perhaps I've been unclear on that. It will
not happen. Period.

Do you have *any* reason, exept that you don't know how/ bother doing it
all again?

 

[Mabden]

flow.

Do you have *any* reason, exept that you don't know how/ bother doing it
all again?

"My initial design involved thumbnails of _various sizes_ that were NOT
resized by any container. So, you'd have a couple of 100x100 images next to
a 300x256 image next to a 200x50 image, etc. With uncontrolled wrapping,
when these images lined up there were lines that would have three images,
one image, whatever. It was very ugly. There were big "holes" and nasty
scrolling effects. I wanted something that would let the user drop any sized
thumbnails they want into a directory and have the page automagically make
them look nice. It was meant to be a script I could give to my girlfriend
and have her drop a bunch of images into a folder and have it look somewhat
decent. I expected to have no control over image size or thumbnail size, so
I tested it with many weird sizes and it looked like shit. So I ended up
forcing the number of columns. Now I allow the user to select a different
number of columns, but all of the above still applies."

 

[Lauri Raittila]

I think you mean something like I tried it, but I was not able to make it
look good, so your idea must be failure too.

So, you didn't read/understand what I told you. I'm not surprised. Else,
could you point out why method I explained earlier wouldn't work better
than fixed columns?

 

[Brendan Taylor]

a.nony.mous:

Whitecrest:
Whitecrest:
This is not to say that you could not take your page and make it more
appealing, and still keep your floating thumbs. But as displayed, it
looks like crap compared to the other example.

If you know that the floating thumbs have nothing to do with how crappy
you think the page looks, then how is your first statement relevant at all?
Do you just like to rip on other people?

 

[Whitecrest]

Oh, ok. I understand. Being crap and looking like crap can be two
different things.

Exactly. Design, crapier than the other example.

You've guessed it. I don't have any artistic talents. I am not a
dee-zyner [dee-zygner? how do you spell that?] and not a professional
photographer either. The page is just a bunch of snapshots.

But you presented the page as an example, All I said what the example
looked like crap compared to my example. I really don't care if you are
professional or not. I was stating why your floating example sucked.

What would you recommend for a bunch of low-res snapshots? To make it
not crap?

Look at the other example, look at other successful photographic sites.
Do a little research into the product and the customer. Hire a graphics
team. Thats a start.