On 3/30/2010 12:08 PM, Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
ok, do i dig lee's post out of my spam filter, or not?
decisions, decisions, decisions... ;+)
***
lee said:
On my system, my browser window is approx 1050 x 1600.
oh lordie.
you make your interface work for the average case, and who reports back? the people who are _not_ average, that's who.
I would argue that one of the most important lessons of the internet is that there is practically no such thing as an "average" user. One of the beauties of well-constructed HTML is that it accommodates itself to /all/ users, not just the mythical "average" user. If you ever come across a web site where you have a right/left scroll bar (and there are many) you know you have encountered a web designer who's stuck in the desktop publishing world.
a 1050*1600 browser-window is a _portrait_ viewport...
are you really using a portrait monitor, lee, or are you just being perverse by arranging your browser-window that way?
Actually, I have two monitors, side-by-side, both rotated into portrait mode. As a programmer, I find I need to see as much code as possible, top to bottom, to grasp the flow of a program, particularly when using a symbolic debugger and significant portions of the window are consumed by watches and stack traces. As I do a lot of client/server programming, I will frequently use one monitor for my development environment and debugging, and the other will be a remote view of the other machine I'm working with. While I can stretch a window across the two monitors, if I maximize a window in snaps to fill just one of the monitors. [snip]
so i think lee and his portrait browser-window might well be having problems negotiating _any_ collaborative proofing site, not to mention almost any site at all these days, if we're real...
Yes, I have similar problems at the FadedPage site, although it's not quite as bad as they have only a single frame containing the page image. And I am finding that the problem is really coming down to the issue of being able to scale the image, not any of the surrounding controls. With a width of 1050 (the maximum resolution of my particular monitors) to reduce the text to a point where I get anything like the kind of layout you describe the text becomes so small as to be illegible; the reason is while I can reduce the font size I can't reduce the page image size, which is really about twice as large as it needs to be to be legible. If anyone has any suggestions as to how to dynamically resize images, I'm all ears, because this is one of the problems I'm going to need to resolve for my own co-operative proofing demonstration. If you want any screen shots of the various configurations I've tried, I'd be happy to e-mail them to you.
anyway, thanks to jim and lee for bringing up the issues that arise around the issue of screen-size (and screen orientation). i was (and am) continually aware of them, thanks to being very fortunate in having had a very big monitor for over 6 years, but it's good to have it reinforced. especially with the netbooks and the iphone/ipad, the range of screensizes is now overwhelming.
Yes. I think this is a critical observation. The variety of devices on the market today is such that no one configuration represents the majority of users. I have rather poor eyesight, so I always set my monitors to the highest possible resolution, then increase the scaling of my fonts to 130-150% of normal. One of my pet peeves is colleagues who assume everyone uses the same font size and as a result build input boxes which are too short for the intended input, or cause controls to actually appear outside of the visible boundaries of the windows. In building UIs, we all need to be more empathetic to the needs of the users who are not just like us. [snip]
there are two sets of radio buttons, one alternating between "b" and "c", and the other between "sho" and "no." I have no idea as to what these two sets of radio buttons accomplishes.
you could've tried them to find out. you know, curiosity. (that thing that killed the cat.)
or i can just tell you...
the b/c set stands for "button" versus "color". this controls the way that flagged words are displayed. the default is by "color", meaning that the flagged words are rendered in red. that makes them stand out, vividly, but it's all that that does.
These radio buttons don't seem to work at all with Firefox 3.5.8 on Windows XP.
i wasn't aiming at "intuitive".
"easily-explained" is good enough
Fair enough. In this case I think you need to include some sort of access to the easy explanation from the page itself. [snip]
I assume that for editing you would like people to use your proprietary s.m.l. markup language.
um, it's "z.m.l." the "z" stands for "zen", remember? and "zero" and "zip" and "zilch" and "zoo" and "zzz".
s.m.l. => Spousal Markup Language. So called, because while there are rules, one has to figure them out for oneself ("it's so obvious I shouldn't have to tell you what they are") and because they're so subtle that one can't really tell when they've been broken. :-)
and it's kind of silly to call it "proprietary", since anyone can invent their own light-markup format, including one that's just like z.m.l., and i will only cheer them on from the sidelines, very raucously...
Proprietary simply means "property of." You have invented the markup language, and I suspect you would take umbrage if someone else were to try and alter it. Anyone can use it, but you "own" it. It is thus proprietary. This situation is neither good nor bad, it's simply the way it is.