How to blow up a thread...or..."God am I glad Val doesn't carry a weapon"

[val]

I just had yet another thread blow up on me, and I thought I would show you all just what happens when you (quite unaware) post large images. Some of you appear to keep your screen resolution higher than the norm, unaware that it's higher than the norm, and post your images according to what you see. I keep mine at the norm since I design websites. The norm is 800x600. Hilary's site is designed for the norm.

To illustrate, I took a couple of screenshots. One to show the fit of a large image, and one to show what happens to the text when a large image has been posted. As soon as your image size surpasses the width of her yellow frame, horizontal scrollbars engage, and the text stretches to fit the new borders set by the width of the new image. When this happens, I have to use my horizontal scrollbar line by line to read the posts. What a pain!

I personally save my images that I'm going to post on this forum at around 550 pixel width. I imagine you could go as high as 600 to stay within the yellow frame without creating scrollbars. But 550-575 is not much smaller in visible size...and considerably smaller in data size. The images below are 560 pixel width, and they're around 50k data size.

http://www.onlineclarity.co.uk/I_Ching_community/messages/786/1127.jpg

http://www.onlineclarity.co.uk/I_Ching_community/messages/786/1128.jpg

I hope this helps.

Love,

Val

[val]

Now here's a screenshot I just took of this thread. Look Ma! No horizontal scrollbar...*grin*

http://www.onlineclarity.co.uk/I_Ching_community/messages/786/1129.jpg

Love,

Val

[candid]

Val, this may seem a lame question, but why is the web standard still 800x600? With so many new computers/monitors and improved graphics out there, why do web designers still format for the lower resolution? And do you see that changing any time soon?

[shelley]

Those who have difficulty with resizing images might be interested in Irfanview (http://www.irfanview.com/), a free image viewer that's very easy to use, can deal with loads of different file types (and convert them - eg great big .bmp to nice little .jpg) and do basic stuff like resizing, cropping, etc.

There are plenty of other functions too, but if all you need is a way to take a huge picture and make it small enough to post here without causing problems then this will do the job without a massive learning curve. You can download it free from the link above.

Hope this is useful.

Love,

Shelley

[hilary]

If I even vaguely remember how I did the table layout for these pages, the main part of the page will size itself to your screen. (It's in %, Val, not pixels, unless Discus has added anything I've missed...) Nowadays 1024x768 is increasingly the 'norm' (probably by now it is - a year ago when I redesigned, 800x600 was only just ahead).

Basically, Candid, people still build for lower resolutions because you can read an 8x6 website on your high resolution monitor (even if it has stupid-looking gaps on the right), but vice versa can't be done. When the proportion of people with lower resolutions drops below about 5%, the designers will probably ignore them. But outside techie-land, people are very slow to upgrade.

(Similarly, many designers of commercial sites still try to make everything compatible with Netscape 4, or at least readable in it. Though it would probably be quicker to pay a personal visit on everyone who still has the indescribable thing installed, and fix things for them.)

Good grief, it's a good job this is Open Space, isn't it? You really shouldn't get me started on this, I could bore the scales off a goldfish.

Thanks for the Irfanview link, Shelley!

[val]

Candid...

*shrugs shoulders* My monitor goes to 1600x1200...lotta good it does me when most commercial sites exist in the left half of the screen at that rez. microsoft and a few others resize at higher rezs, but since they're designed to be at their optimum in 800x600, it doesn't work all that well. It's much easier to read text in smaller blocks than long lines.

It will be nice when the standard does change...can get more columns on a page...*grin*

Love,

Val

[joang]

Strangely enough, Hilary, I did not find that boring at all. Must have been something I smoked.
8-)