[thelist] Higher Screen Resolutions

Hassan Schroeder hassan.schroeder at gmail.com
Fri May 21 09:47:34 CDT 2010


On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 2:05 AM, Barney Carroll
<barney.carroll at gmail.com> wrote:

>> ?! I've been involved with web applications that needed all the real estate
>> possible to effectively show a spreadsheet-like data table, and even then
>> some compromises were required.
>
> In this very special case your application design would have to be defined
> by the nature of the content as opposed to eventual form factor — you would
> have to settle for horizontal scroll bars even on the widest resolutions
> depending on the data at hand. I'm not suggesting you wrap everything in a
> 960px wrapper with overflow hidden, or that the tables you'd be dealing with
> face a max-width:960px imposition — however if your interface layout
> (including the data view and any other necessary modules such as navigation,
> filters, editing tools, etc) requires more than 1024px, you're still in
> trouble. I imagine you went with something whereby you have page elements
> hugging the left and right of the viewport, with the data occupying whatever
> space remained?

The particularly extreme case I'm citing was designed to run maximized
(at least width-wise) on a large Sun monitor; all the navigation/controls
were at the top and bottom of the page so the full width was available.
Not every view had a full-width table in it, but they were all extremely
data-dense.

It was semi-usable on a standard laptop using JavaScript to hide/show
elements, but we had to create a completely different interface to offer a
subset of the data via the only "mobile" device of the time, the wireless
Palm pda (Palm VI?).

Which in today's terms corresponds to companies providing dedicated
smartphone "apps" rather than relying on a desktop-browser-oriented
web site to convey the same information in a constrained form factor.

And the wheel goes around again.... :-)

-- 
Hassan Schroeder ------------------------ hassan.schroeder at gmail.com
twitter: @hassan


More information about the thelist mailing list