[thelist] Screen Resolution, which to design for?

[Pringle, Ron]

Barney wrote:

Yes, that has to be it at the end of the day - a sober judgment on the 
target audience(s). And your statement is pretty sobering, Ron.

Must admit that everyone I know has broadband (there are those who have 
no home connection but will use the local libraries or any of the 
several internet caffes around town).

I get a certain amount of frustration from the seemingly non-sensical 
situation of standardisation and progress in universal web technologies 
being matched by an ever growing sensitivity for ever-dwindling legacy 
systems - it seems like spitting in the face of progress, but in fact 
it's essential to remember exactly what the state of affairs is when 
you're in danger of being blinded by the light.

<snip>

Regards,
Barney

Barney-

Honestly, I went through a 3-6 month re-learning period when I came here. I threw out everything I thought I knew about web design and development, junked all the pre-concieved notions I had built up over 10 years of private sector web design and print publishing, and started from scratch. It was enlightening and scary. And I'm certainly not on top of it all either. Definitely a sobering experience.

On the other hand, I personally go into convulsions if I lose broadband access for more than 5 minutes! :-)

I am now running into the situation where I find that people who visit our site are either on the low end or the high end. Increasingly, there is a digital divide there. As others have suggested, and probably the point of this thread is, how do you support both ends? And then add handhelds on top of that?

I originally designed our site to expand to the size of the browser, but at 1280 x whatever, its getting ugly and less and less usable. I probably will go with a jello style layout and attempt to serve handhelds with a separate stylesheet. the idea of using Javascript for different style sheets is appealing as well, as long as I could still support screen readers with little or no JS support.

Ron