[thelist] Site check please

[VOLKAN ÖZÇELİK]

31st Dec 2005
08:10 am
Less than a day :)

>Have you sorted the aspect ratio problem on the
> gallery? (cant check today as im on a 5 min a day ratio on bloody
> narrowband)

Not really. Actually I'm expecting a (really delaied) payment from the client.
Unless he pays me my money, I'm not gonna do additional work, except
for the minor fixes.

Although the aspect ratio issue seems an easy problem to solve, it
will take several hours (may be half a day) for me (because I use a
float layout instead of tables, ala style drop shadows instead of
original drop shadows and this kinda layout expects pretty much fixed
witdh-height images
-- so high-tech does not always make life easier :)
)

To sort out the problem I may

1. create floating containers of the same width-height in the place of
the product images
2. calculate the scaled down widht/height of the image preserving the
aspect ratio.
3. put the scaled down images inside the containers.

Beside I have another problem to solve.

1. graceful degredation for
i. small bandwitdh users,
ii.non ajax users,
iii. users who do not prefer to use ajax for one reason or another
(may be the user wants to bookmark a certain catalogue page and send
it to a friend)

If the client were generous enough, I would have bought some extra
server space to put thumbnail images and used good old html with
actual href links and thumbnail images which would load much faster.

>
>  btw - is it possible for you to check the users bandwidth before making
> them wait?
>

it may be done on the client side by statistical means.
i. try to load 2 large images.
ii. take the average download time.
iii. compare with average bytes transfered.
iv. decide whether it is suitable for the user to use ajax
v. set a cookie for that [1]

(wow, this will be a nice idea to put in my toolbox to be used in the future)

with a message like
"please wait while we try to calculate your bandwith... blah blah"

the drawback of step 5 is, should the user change his connection type
(say from dialup to ADSL) the cookie will be still there and treat the
user as a dialup user.

May be  a per-session cookie suit this purpose better.

The second alternative would be to directly ask the user.

What is your connection type.
* adsl (256kbps)
* lease line (x kbps)
* cable
* dialup

And here the odds are the user
i. an average carpet buyer need not know what an adsl is what a kbps
is :) So it is possible to check the first option and go away.
ii. the user (although using dialup) may think "why should'nt I have
the benefits given to an adsl user, I'm gonna check adsl anyway".

The first one may be overcome by education. However the second one is
remedyless :)

>if so, default to simple img tags. Im not sure that the
> little revolving thingy, though neat, is enough, though - id need a
> proper taskbar like in flash movies.

Yeah, the progressbar would be a good add on.
Implementing it server-side is a real pain in the rear.
It may be implemented on the client side by statistical means
1. get the average connection speen from [1].
2. calculate the download time of the first image
3. if it is downloaded in less than a second - discard it (the image is cached)
4. else do a moving average with 1.
5. since
  i. I know the total number of remainin images (5 in this case)
  ii. the average download time per byte.
  iii. the total byte sizes of the remainig images.

it will be easy to sketch out a progress bar.

(
well that's another good idea, I'll write an article on that.
Thank you for making me think :)
)

>  and the xml / css / wai - i think thats appropriate for zengarden but
> not really for people buying stuff, unless you tuck it away on another
> page.

well that's for my portfolio I admit.
I submit the sites I design to several standards-aware listings (like
w3csites.com)

the second reason, I will put a link there back to my page (sarmal.com)

thirdly, I care about carpet-buyer designers :) (well that's a small
subset :)) )

Anyway, as I mentioned, the visitors of the site will not only be
designers but also design-evaluators (like you) :)

Though if my client says "what the f*ck is that w3c stuff?" then I may
consider removing it :)

>Whos the client here Mr Carpet-dealer,  or .... you? impressing
> your peers huh?

As I said both ;)

>
> My 6 cents.   hey thats ... .wait, err thats .. .. 10 cents you owe me!
>

If you come around Istanbul I'll buy you a beer :)


Happy New Year
--
Volkan Ozcelik
+>Yep! I'm blogging! : http://www.volkanozcelik.com/volkanozcelik/blog/
+> My projects/studies/trials/errors : http://www.sarmal.com/