[thelist] defined table width and accessibility

[aardvark]

On 1 Jun 2005 at 15:55, Ian Anderson wrote:
[...]
> Yes, I think I read it some time ago. It's good to have quantified 
> statistics for the prevalance of small displays. But this doesn't 
> address UA behaviour, does it?

not sure i understand the question... that article addressed window 
sizes vs. screen sizes -- something that too many developers assumed 
were on and the same at the time...

[...]
> Thing is, what is the matter if the images *are* scaled or displaced? 
> Why is this a bad thing? If the content is still available, transformed 
> to better meet the limitations of the device where possible, surely this 
> counts as essentially a near perfect result?

that depends... where the images are essential to the understanding 
of the content (or in those cases where the images *are* the content -
- as text-as-gif copy, for example) this is a problem... i was at a 
site last night that (sadly) set all its copy in images... i was also 
reading an article on alzheimers (can't remember where)[1] where the 
diagrams were very interesting to see, and without them it would have 
impaired my ability to understand some of the article...

IOW, developers need to not just *insert* content, they need to 
*understand* it so they can handle for these exceptions in their 
code...

> What do you want, all four columns of the BBC web site scaled 
> proportionally to fit 240 pixels? What *does* it look like in your Dell 
> Axim? It would be brilliant if you could post a screen shot or digital 
> photo somewhere for the education of the unwashed such as I...Perhaps of 
> BBC home page contrasted with stopdesign.com - similarly complex layout 
> grids, totally different way of building them...

erm, lemme figger out how to get screen caps out of it...


[1] yes, that was a pun.