Web Site Width

[Beauregard T. Shagnasty]

Have you been around here for long?

Yes he has, but he never pays attention to what else goes on. He is,
after all, RtS!

 

[Jonathan N. Little]

For all: Does anybody even care about WebTV users?

<Blinky raises the fin with "NO" painted on it>

Same here, but unfortunately MS keeps a Rasputin-spell on them so there
are still WebTV users other there. AOL as a similar spell

 

[Beauregard T. Shagnasty]

Bullshit. You write the page size in accordance with what the majority
of your visitors use.

That's right! The overwhelming majority of my visitors use browser
windows with sizes of ..

Um ..

Just about anything they care to use! And I don't care either!

 

[Bergamot]

Then what aboujt webtv users who have no horizontal scroll
bar?

Besides what Blinky said, webtv doesn't need a horizontal scrollbar. It
reformats or shrinks the content to fit in the available space.

Ya gonna write a page just for them? And now with cell phones and
PPC's........yeah right.

Here's a hint for ya: if you don't set explicit widths, the page will
adjust itself to the available space. Or use % widths instead of other
inflexible methods.

Us little guys who do all the work and design
and don't get paid for it ain't gonna do that.

Gee, it ain't rocket surgery. This stuff has been around for eons -
where have you been all this time?

 

[Jonathan N. Little]

Gee, it ain't rocket surgery.

Or brain science ;-)

 

[Harlan Messinger]

So what are site designers to do then? Write a page for every
conceivable screen size?
Or write for the smallest setting alone?
Bullshit. You write the page size in accordance with what the majority
of your visitors use.
>
> You sure as hell don't write it to make 1 out of
> 100 happy. Then what aboujt webtv users who have no horizontal scroll
> bar? Ya gonna write a page just for them? And now with cell phones and
> PPC's........yeah right. Us little guys who do all the work and design
> and don't get paid for it ain't gonna do that.
>

This is the kind of thing people wrote ten years ago when the Web was
new to most of its users and screens had been mostly 15" and 800 x 600
ever since Windows came along and there were few plug-in projectors and
no handheld-based browsers and people never really thought about this
not being a permanent situation. They also designed websites exclusively
for Netscape because first there wasn't an IE, and then there was but it
was less popular and was *never* going to come close to Netscape in
popularity. And even later, people designed exclusively for IE because
everyone knew that Netscape was being abandoned in droves and that no
one new would *ever* pose a serious challenge to Microsoft in the
browser department. But then Firefox came along, and ....

By now it should have dawned on everyone designing any kind of computer
interface that "what the majority of your visitors use" is not some
inert and eternal set of characteristics, and unless you want to be
redesigning all your interfaces, or else watching your layouts break or
become unreadable, every two years as resolutions get higher and people
are using both larger and smaller screens and browsers change features
and wax and wane in popularity, you really ought to do yourself a big,
fat favor and design your sites following standards as much as possible
and using a flexible layout.

 

[cwdjrxyz]

Besides what Blinky said, webtv doesn't need a horizontal scrollbar. It
reformats or shrinks the content to fit in the available space.

The thing to remember is that any computer or set top box, such as
WebTV that uses a standard(not HD) TV as a monitor will make the size
of fonts often used on web pages unreadable. If you have a standard TV
video output on your PC, just connect it to your TV and you will soon
see what I mean. This output works well for movies, but not web page
text.Thus WebTV and other devices that use a standard TV must do
something to make the text readable. They convert text to a large
enough font size to be readable, even if a font sized in fixed pixels
is used. The page may then look a bit strange, but it at least can be
read. The other thing is that the width is around 540 px (a border
mask takes up a little of the screen size) on WebTV using a TV
monitor. Thus even a page designed for 800 px width will be cut off on
the right without scrolling, and WebTV/MSNTV does not scroll to the
left or right. You only have to use percentages, or something else
that does not specify a fixed width, to avoid this problem, just as
use of percentages allows the page to be viewed on a wide range of
screen widths on PCs. In general, if you use simple html for the page,
it will then view properly on WebTV/MSNTV and many small portable
devices that have a much smaller screen width than used on modern PCs.

If you decide to use JavaScript, then WebTV/MSNTV, has some very
strange bugs, and these have varied for different revisions. If any
JavaScript on a page is important to understanding the page, you had
best view the page on a WebTV simulator(viewer) that can be downloaded
from Microsoft. Of course many in this group will tell you not to use
JS for things important to understanding or navigation of the page in
the first place, because some PC users turn off script, etc.

WebTV/MSNTV has also had some CSS bugs in various revisions, and it
does not support some of the more recent and fancy CSS. If you keep
your CSS fairly basic, there usually is no problem. These set top
boxes usually are a few revisions behind in flash, media players, etc,
so if you use media that requires features available in only the most
recent versions of flash, for example, the flash may not work properly
or at all on the set top box.

So far as I know WebTV/MSNTV has been used mainly in the US and
Canada. The Canadian usage may have been discontinued. Also a version
of WebTV was built into some early small dish satellite DBS TV
receivers sold in the US. I believe this was discontinued several
years ago, and I am not sure if any of these old recievers are still
in operation and still allow connection to WebTV.