[thelist] wide-screen monitors and sites

Bob Meetin ontheroad at frii.com
Fri Feb 9 16:22:04 CST 2007


Bill, all,

Myself - I have never mussed with DPI settings - I just checked - my 
laptop with a normal monitor is set to 96 - I don't know about the 
widescreen that I borrowed.  I recall verifying that the resolution was 
fine.  This stretching problem - once before I had a friend of a client 
mention to me that she was seeing something with some rows pushed up.  I 
could not see this even on my linux pc and a very high resolution 
monitor, but when I borrowed the widescreen laptop for the weekend, I 
checked and found that as well (and of course fixed).

The question here is twofold - as I develop sites must I be checking 
them on widescreens as well - and if so, will the nice large standalones 
(21"-22") give me the same display as those on laptops? I hate to think 
this, but it might also be that the widescreen exposed problems in 
design techniques(some learning curve...), meaning that the monitor is a 
tool, a crutch.

-Bob



Bill Moseley wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 09, 2007 at 10:45:24AM -0700, Bob Meetin wrote:
>   
>> What was interesting here is that viewing sites through FF on widescreen 
>> did not appear to cause any distortion or stretching but with IE (6*) 
>> sites were stretched wide (in addition to some breaking).  The question 
>> to the group, will widescreen standalone monitors behave the same as 
>> laptops and/or is it possible that the widescreen laptop (borrowed) had 
>> some configuration issues which only seemed to impact IE?  The browser 
>> (IE) properties were pretty vanilla).  What I want to avoid is 
>> purchasing a monitor to visualize a problem that isn't really a monitor 
>> issue.  -Bob
>>     
>
> Sounds more like a DPI setting problem on that computer than an issue
> with the monitor (I run at 2560x960 and everything looks just like on
> my laptop at 1024x768).
>
> I don't know much about IE, but I think there's automatic "scaling"
> with IE.  Maybe that's the problem.  Quick google:
>
>     http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/overview/highdpi.asp
>
> Maybe the page you were looking at was using both pixels and em's or
> percents and assuming the display would be 96dpi.
>   




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