[thelist] screen resolutions

aardvark roselli at earthlink.net
Wed Sep 6 23:40:40 CDT 2000


(just because he plugged my articles doesn't mean i won't
respond...)

> From: Isaac Forman
>
> > I see Yahoo doesn't fit on a 640x480 screen.
> > Does that mean I don't have to
> > care either??
> >
> > Anybody have stats?
>
> Yeh, 100% of me doesn't give a fuck what Yahoo is
> doing. ;)

+1 on that, daddy-o... i was surprised today when i went to
Yahoo and saw it didn't fit in my 640-wide window... the
reason i went to Yahoo wasn't to search -- i wanted a screen
capture from my browser *without* a horizontal scroll bar so
i could wrap it around a prototype i was working on for a
client (how's that for timing)... i was actually kind of
annoyed that they aren't 640-friendly anymore...

what's absurd is that they coded the width to "640"... why?
what did those 40 extra pixels get them anyway?  it
certainly isn't doing anything for a user at a higher
resolution, so what were they trying to address?  new
webmaster who forgot about chrome?  i almost think it's an
error and it got past QA...

> OK, seriously, check out Adrian's article: 640 x
> 480 Isn't Dead Just Yet
> http://www.evolt.org/index.cfm?menu=8&cid=275

the skinny from that article -- from late '98 / early '99,
12%-15% of users were at 640x480... read the logic and
testing methodology behind that, though...

> Real-World Browser Size Stats, Part II
> http://www.evolt.org/index.cfm?menu=8&cid=2297

the skinny from this (Part I tells you how to roll your own
resolution logger with JS and ASP) -- for one sample site,
almost 6% of users run at 640x480 for the middle of this
year... it's also worth noting that not all of the visitors
ran full-screen browsers (i logged browser size and
bit-depth as well)...

> there are millions more who
> have large resolution monitors, but surf with
> multiple windows set to
> approximately 700px wide. These same people hate
> resizing to accommodate a site
> (especially if they're using pitiful Netscape
> which reloads the entire page each
> time you resize horizontally...)

i'm one of those... dozens of 640x480 windows on my
1280x1024 display...

> A good intermediate step is to make sure that
> everything to the right of the
> 600px mark is non-core information. Things like
> simple instructions for stepping
> through a procedure, or product specials, or
> panel ads, links to other sites,
> design elements, etc would be good here.

a perfect example:
http://www.cnn.com/2000/LAW/09/06/mp3.lawsuit.01/index.html

CNN articles are very good about this, and with my 640x480
window, i find it very pleasant to read and ignore the stuff
on the right...

and then of course, there are liquid pages...
http://evolt.org/index.cfm?menu=8&cid=2321





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