How to detect table width or height?

[Dennis]

Is there some way --using, say, DOM or javascript-- to detect the
current pixel width and/or height of a relatively sized table or of
one of its columns or rows. I'm going to be writing javascript to
adjust my page to the viewer's browser window dimensions and this
would sure be great information to have.

Thanks ....
Dennis

[Dennis]

On Tue, 21 Oct 2003 12:29:31 +0100, "Barry Pearson"
<ne**@childsupportanalysis.co.uk> wrote:

The key is that they don't like it, not that they know how to disable it.
Users who don't like Flash but can't disable it can often just go elsewhere,
as I typically did before I disabled it.

The point about the small sample is well made. Dennis is trying to solve
problems with his web sites. Success or failure depends on what he does to the
web sites, and how his target audience reacts to what he does. So Dennis'
challenge is to get the best advice he can, develop his web sites accordingly,
and hope that the target audience likes the result.
Ideally, my visitors won't even know they're seeing Flash. It it
loads quick and I design it right (use system fonts, etc), it will be
just another web site as far as they're is concerned.
Debates here don't influence his target audience. They will accept or reject
his web sites completely oblivious to who has scored how many debating points
in Usenet! So he needs to judge whether his potential users like Flash - not
try to persuade people here to like Flash, or criticise them by implication.

On this topic, I got an excellent book, Inside Dreamweaver MX by Laura
Gutman, Patricia J. Ayers, Donald S. Booth (New Riders, 2002). In
chapter 8 - Design Issues- they make the distinction between a
user-centered versus a company-centered information structure. For
your website to be truly usable, you have to think about it from the
point of view of what the user wants from it --not how it is organized
in terms of departments and so on. (Or if it has Flash or CSS)
Conventional software often makes the same mistake of laying out a
program's functionality much too closely in terms of the subroutines
and functions that make it work. It's an engineer's sort of mistake.
Thinking about my site in terms of the different sorts of people who
will come to it (what they WANT) instead of in terms of what the site
has available, has changed the way I look at the site's structure.

I have to say, the notion of content being separate from presentation
--the fundamental CSS ethic if I can call it that-- has awesome
potential as far I can see it. We have graphic based HTML editors out
there --like Dreamweaver-- that take intuitive visual arrangements and
extricate from them the "ugly code" that is the lingua franca of
browsers. Cool. So now where are the "content editors" into which I
can drop my content (my innocent little lists that I want to see
wrapped in column form) and have software beasts churn out the ungodly
code? Give me that and I'll drop Flash in a second. Unless of
course the software spits out a swf!

Dennis

[Christoph Paeper]

*Dennis* <theonlyDennis@removeForSpam_mindspring.com>:

Google and the other robots out there ought to increase their
vocabulary and start reading those swf files!

Yeah, right. Why should they? Most of current Flash content on the Web is
pink noise and there're no signs for it getting better, thus it would be
extremely stupid for a SE provider to put a lot of energy and money into
attempts to parse it properly.

--
"Music is essentially useless, as life is."
George Santayana

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Sun, 26 Oct 2003, Erik Funkenbusch wrote:

Actually, it's very easy to design your site to scale images along with the
text based on the users preferred text size. You just specify your image
sizes in em's instead of pixels.
Indeed, though the quality of the results in popular browsers may
leave something to be desired.
Of course this technique isn't as precise as pixels.

It's more precisely based on the user's text size preference setting.
With display dpi settings varying over at least a 2:1 range - more in
some cases, and almost no display systems being calibrated by the user
to the correct physical size, what better measure of user
acceptability can you offer?

[Shawn K. Quinn]

Dennis wrote:

On Thu, 16 Oct 2003 15:50:26 -0400, Stan Brown
<th************@fastmail.fm> wrote:

It will, for people who have Flash installed and turned on.

Many people don't have it installed; many who do have it installed
have turned it off because so much Flash is just annoying time-
wasting "kewl" visual effect.

So your choice by using Flash is for complete success or complete
failure, as opposed to 100% success or partial success if you don't
use Flash.
Something like 97% of web surfers out there do.

You have no way of knowing this with any reasonable degree of confidence.
And those few who don't can easily get it.
Even on non-i386 Unix boxes? Text-only browsers? Mobile phones? PDAs? Aural
browsers? How about browsing situations where the user does not have
permission to install arbitrary third party software, where the Flash
plug-in, even if available for the given OS, is not installed?
End of problem.

No, sir. Beginning of problems. *Your* problems.

--
Shawn K. Quinn

[Mikko Rantalainen]

Dennis wrote:

On Tue, 21 Oct 2003 14:08:33 -0500, kchayka <kc*********@sihope.com>
wrote:

With HTML, I have control over text size. I can make text whatever size
it needs to be for me to read it. Flash can't do that.

You can put your own font buttons on your flash movie and change the
font size that way. Admitedly, it would be slicker if the user's
existing browser settings would do that automatically. But just out
of curiosity, what do you do about graphics?

What graphics? Are you suggesting that somebody is still hardcoding
textual content inside images? In that case the correct way to read the
content with high accessibility is to turn off the images and read ALT
content instead. You know, the little part of the page that's *required
by the spec* and which is meant to be used if, for any reason, the
images cannot be used or understood.

Yes, you can do pretty much anything with flash, including implementing
your own user interface for accessibility, but no existing site does
that. I'm pretty sure that most of us trashing flash think that flash
should include that kind of features by default. Those features would be
required for pretty much any flash site and those controls are just a
little too important to look, feel and behave a little bit different on
every site. If those controls are implemented by *page author* at all,
that is.

In my experience, most of the time, flash is selected because it makes
easier for the content author to fix layout, allows animations and other
little gimmicks without much work. The key point here is that flash is
usually selected because it allows doing those things *easier* than with
some other method. If the tool is selected because it's easier, is it
any wonder that none of those authors did implement the accessibility
part that the flash plugin *should have been* already implemented.
In addition, if you decide to implement whole "site" with flash, you
have to provide something very special to keep the user long enough to
learn to use the interface you provide for adjusting the font size to
their liking. That is, if they have flash already installed before
entering the "site".

And no matter what you do, you'll break some of the user interface the
user is already familiar with; I've configured my browser the way I like
to use it. And if some site doesn't support *mouse wheel* (no flash
"site" has done that, this far), doesn't support my *mouse gestures* (no
flash "site" can support those, because the flash plugin captures the
mouse events but has no way to know what to do with those because I've
customized my gestures from default) and it doesn't support the normal
UI actions to change font size. Yes, for the average frustrated chump
playing whack-the-popup, your flash "site" might be a step up, but for
me, I believe a well done web site based on recommended (X)HTML
technology, gives me a better user experience.

(The reason I call those as flash "sites" is that I really cannot
consider something being a "site" if that has only one page. You know
what happens to your great application the moment user presses the back
button just once? The whole application vanishes without a warning! A
correctly designed web application -- that is, an application with user
interface implemented with (X)HTML -- allows the user to press his back
button any moment he sees fit and the application should return to
previous view or dialog. Also, the user should be allowed to branch the
session: many web applications break if you select "Open in a New
Window" on any link inside the application user interface and continue
to use paraller sessions of the application. Making browser based user
interfaces without resorting javascript hacks for a single browser brand
and still keeping the user interface looking nice is hard. Trust me,
I've done such work for a living for a couple of years.)

--
Mikko

[Mikko Rantalainen]

Dennis wrote:

On Mon, 20 Oct 2003 12:46:51 +1000, Mark Parnell
<we*******@clarkecomputers.com.au> wrote:

Without Flash (or a more mature CSS) I have to aim at the
middle of the bell curve (what, 800 by 600?) and let automatic
scrolling and huge empty borders do the rest.

Not at all. The web is fluid by nature. If you don't specify fixed sizes,
then the page will flow automatically.

While that is true, you must admit that most all the top websites opt
for an "800-wide non-horizontal flowing" format (typically aligned

It's because "others are doing it too". I think the 800 pixels wide rule
comes from early Windows versions often running 800x600 resolution on
low end hardware and with such a small screen, the only sane thing is to
always maximize the browser window.

The 800 pixels wide rule was OK when the "only" way to access it was
with a desktop computer but nowadays we have much more diversity in the
devices used to access the net. We have pretty much anything from 1 bit
101x86 pixel screen (some cellurar phone with XHTML browser) to
2000x1500 pixel stereo display with 30 bit color (high end 3D
workstation) and *the same* document or site should adjust to both
displays. This is not going to happen, if you have *any* width defined
in pixels. Highly probably the layout is going to fail on smaller
screens if you have anything big side-by-side.

There's some CSS based solutions in the future (you can apply rules
based on viewport size, for example) but we aren't there yet.

Another reason for the 800 pixels wide rule is that some page authors
haven't yet understood that design for a fixed size page (paper) isn't
the same thing as designing for the web. For a paper, you can fix some
things relative to each other and to the whole page. For the web, any
assumptions about the page "size" can prove wrong.

If your page is usable with a single line braille display, I guess it's
usable with anything. Sometimes you have to make a compromise and target
to something "better" than a single line braille display but even in
that case you can do much better that using the 800 rule.

--
Mikko

[Jim Ley]

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 19:58:22 +0200, Mikko Rantalainen <mi**@st.jyu.fi>
wrote:

Dennis wrote:
We have pretty much anything from 1 bit
101x86 pixel screen (some cellurar phone with XHTML browser) to
2000x1500 pixel stereo display with 30 bit color (high end 3D
workstation) and *the same* document or site should adjust to both
displays.
I simply do not agree with such a blanket statement, reading across
more than 800 pixels or so I find impossible (regardless of text size
it's the actual scanning of the eye which is my problem), it's just
too difficult, a maximum width is very important to the usability of
your content IMO.

This is the reason I feel most people suggest widths, small screens do
not suffer as they generally ignore widths anyway, the only people to
suffer is the people with a slightly smaller than expected width
available to them - hence the recommendations on size.
If your page is usable with a single line braille display, I guess it's
usable with anything.

Then you would guess incorrectly.

Jim.
--
comp.lang.javascript FAQ - http://jibbering.com/faq/

[Steve Pugh]

ji*@jibbering.com (Jim Ley) wrote:

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 19:58:22 +0200, Mikko Rantalainen <mi**@st.jyu.fi>
wrote:

Dennis wrote:
We have pretty much anything from 1 bit
101x86 pixel screen (some cellurar phone with XHTML browser) to
2000x1500 pixel stereo display with 30 bit color (high end 3D
workstation) and *the same* document or site should adjust to both
displays.
I simply do not agree with such a blanket statement, reading across
more than 800 pixels or so I find impossible (regardless of text size
it's the actual scanning of the eye which is my problem),

As you say, it's your problem. Other people may experience things
differently.

You choose to have your browser window at a certain width.

If the scanning of the eye (i.e. the angle through which it must move
to see both end of a line of text) is the problem then that doesn't
depend simply on the number of pixels, rather it depends on the
physical size of the monitor and the resolution (in pixels per inch
terms) and the distance from monitor to eyeball.

An author has no way of knowing any of those variables.

If I lean back in my chair I can read long lines much more easily. How
is a web site to react to that and make it's lines longer? It can't
but I can increase the size of my browser window and a fluid website
will react accordingly.

max-width in a user stylesheet would overcome your problem as you
describe it above.

Or indeed simply setting your browser window to be the widthj you find
most comfortable.
This is the reason I feel most people suggest widths,

I feel that "most people" design their web sites in Photoshop or
whatever and then translate a static image into a static web page.

Steve

--
"My theories appal you, my heresies outrage you,
I never answer letters and you don't like my tie." - The Doctor

Steve Pugh <st***@pugh.net> <http://steve.pugh.net/>

[Jim Ley]

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 19:40:06 +0000, Steve Pugh <st***@pugh.net> wrote:

ji*@jibbering.com (Jim Ley) wrote:

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 19:58:22 +0200, Mikko Rantalainen <mi**@st.jyu.fi>
wrote:
I simply do not agree with such a blanket statement, reading across
more than 800 pixels or so I find impossible (regardless of text size
it's the actual scanning of the eye which is my problem),
As you say, it's your problem. Other people may experience things
differently.

Sure, but I believe it's common enough for authors to choose it as a
default suggestion.
If the scanning of the eye [...] and the distance from monitor to eyeball.

I understoof the pixel was defined with reference to the distance from
the eyeball, please correct me if I'm wrong.

Jim.
--
comp.lang.javascript FAQ - http://jibbering.com/faq/

[Christoph Paeper]

*Jim Ley* <ji*@jibbering.com>:

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 19:58:22 +0200, Mikko Rantalainen <mi**@st.jyu.fi>

reading across more than 800 pixels or so I find impossible
(regardless of text size
You're assuming a 43cm (17in) display with 1024px * 768px here, right?
(With real world, not theoretical CSS pixels that is.)
a maximum width is very important to the usability of
your content IMO.
Yes, it aids more than it harms, IMHO. The value should be selected quite
large, though, maybe 45-50em.
This is the reason I feel most people suggest widths,

No, they do to remain in control of the presentation, which they never were
anyway.

--
"Not only does God play dice with the universe,
but sometimes he throws them where they cannot be seen."
Stephen Hawking

[Steve Pugh]

ji*@jibbering.com (Jim Ley) wrote:

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 19:40:06 +0000, Steve Pugh <st***@pugh.net> wrote:

If the scanning of the eye [...] and the distance from monitor to eyeball.

I understoof the pixel was defined with reference to the distance from
the eyeball, please correct me if I'm wrong.

That's how it's defined in the CSS spec. But no browser that actually
uses that definition has ever been sighted, much less caught and
brought back for study.

Steve

--
"My theories appal you, my heresies outrage you,
I never answer letters and you don't like my tie." - The Doctor

Steve Pugh <st***@pugh.net> <http://steve.pugh.net/>

[Barry Pearson]

Jim Ley wrote:

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 19:58:22 +0200, Mikko Rantalainen <mi**@st.jyu.fi>
wrote:

Dennis wrote:
We have pretty much anything from 1 bit
101x86 pixel screen (some cellurar phone with XHTML browser) to
2000x1500 pixel stereo display with 30 bit color (high end 3D
workstation) and *the same* document or site should adjust to both
displays.

I simply do not agree with such a blanket statement, reading across
more than 800 pixels or so I find impossible (regardless of text size
it's the actual scanning of the eye which is my problem), it's just
too difficult, a maximum width is very important to the usability of
your content IMO.

[snip]

I agree, but I also believe that there is much more to this than the total
size of the display.

Content often has inherent size, too. A GIF, a PNG, a JPEG, or a form for
input, is often designed for a particular width. The designers of the web site
had a vision in mind, in which this element occupied X% of the width, and that
element occupied Y% of the width. People who can only change the HTML & CSS
are ultimately limited.

The designers envisioned the overall viewport. They had a view of some X-box
Y-column layout. They said "let's have this form fitting in here; let's have
this image fitting in there". So people deliver such content to be authored.
And authoring has to make do with what it has.

If authoring allows the viewport width to dramatically change without
horizontal scrolling, the relationship between the inherent sizes of that
content and the viewport width can become silly. Perhaps that form designed to
occupy X% of the width of the viewport suddenly occupies 110% of it, or 1% of
it.

In order to accommodate support of very different viewport widths, we also
need much more scalability of content. SVG to replace lots of image content.
Perhaps JPEG2000 to support much more scability of photographic content. Etc.

Text is inherently scalable. Very little other content is. The page design is
typically constrained by its unscalable content. It makes sense to design for
a certain size, so that all the unscalable content fits into it. And 800 x 600
is the obvious choice at the moment. But in 5 years time ...?

--
Barry Pearson
http://www.Barry.Pearson.name/photography/
http://www.BirdsAndAnimals.info/
http://www.ChildSupportAnalysis.co.uk/

[I V]

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 22:39:02 +0000, Steve Pugh wrote:

ji*@jibbering.com (Jim Ley) wrote:

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 19:40:06 +0000, Steve Pugh <st***@pugh.net> wrote:

If the scanning of the eye [...] and the distance from monitor to eyeball.

I understoof the pixel was defined with reference to the distance from
the eyeball, please correct me if I'm wrong.

That's how it's defined in the CSS spec. But no browser that actually
uses that definition has ever been sighted, much less caught and
brought back for study.

Well, yes and no. The CSS spec says that, "If the pixel density of the
output device is very different from that of a typical computer display,
the user agent should rescale pixel values," and then gives an explanation
of a 'reference pixel', which is presumably intended to aid anyone
implementing such a rescaling. It _doesn't_ say, at least as I interpret
it, that a CSS UA has to interpret pixel lengths precisely using this
reference pixel. So, a browser intended for desktop use which uses screen
pixels as CSS pixels, regardless of the DPI of the screen, is, I think,
doing what the CSS spec says it should.

--
"- Penny, I worry that you are loosing heart... You are not the sweet little
girl I once knew. Where's your sense of wonder?
- Currently flowing into a sanitary napkin... Guess where my childlike
innocence and idle dreams are currently wedged. Come on, I dare you."
http://www.huh.34sp.com/

[kchayka]

Jim Ley wrote:

I simply do not agree with such a blanket statement, reading across
more than 800 pixels or so I find impossible (regardless of text size
it's the actual scanning of the eye which is my problem)
The problem is the number of characters per line, not the number of
pixels. I need a larger than average text size and an 800px width
restriction often _causes_ readability problems.

Something you don't mention is that many of these sites that used a
fixed width layout also use multiple columns, plus they tend to set
microfonts. After I override their silly font sizes so I can read it,
there ends up being only a couple words per line in a column. IMO, this
is a far worse readability problem than lines that are a bit long.

With a fluid layout, at least I can adjust my window width to help
readability when I need to. Can't do that with a fixed design,
especially a table-based layout, which many of these sites are.
a maximum width is very important to the usability of
your content IMO.

OK fine, but if that content is text, set a max width in em or ex units,
not a fixed with in pixels. Use the right tool for the job, and all
that jazz.

--
To email a reply, remove (dash)un(dash). Mail sent to the un
address is considered spam and automatically deleted.

[kchayka]

Dennis wrote:

On Tue, 21 Oct 2003 14:08:33 -0500, kchayka <kc*********@sihope.com>
wrote:

With HTML, I have control over text size. I can make text whatever size
it needs to be for me to read it. Flash can't do that.
You can put your own font buttons on your flash movie and change the
font size that way. Admitedly, it would be slicker if the user's
existing browser settings would do that automatically.

Ah, I see now that you are going for "slick". Usability and
accessibility normally take a back seat in these cases. I have never
seen a Flash site that had any kind of font user control, probably
because if the author really cared about this, I doubt they would have
used Flash in the first place.
But just out of curiosity, what do you do about graphics?

I could care less about eye-candy. Photos aren't normally a problem
unless the dimensions are tiny. Graphics that masquerade as text are
the only real issue. Turning off image loading helps only if the author
uses appropriate alt text. Many do not. In these cases, the browser's
back button works quite nicely. ;)

--
To email a reply, remove (dash)un(dash). Mail sent to the un
address is considered spam and automatically deleted.

[kchayka]

Jim Ley wrote:

I simply do not agree with such a blanket statement, reading across
more than 800 pixels or so I find impossible (regardless of text size
it's the actual scanning of the eye which is my problem),

I believe it's common enough for authors to choose it as a
default suggestion.

If it were simply a suggestion, it wouldn't be so bad, but the huge
majority of these 800px wide sites use table layouts, often nested
tables. Few browsers let the user disable table support and attempts to
get around table width issues via user stylesheets generally don't work
well.

BTW, we all know that fixing font-size falls under the evil heading,
right? So what makes fixing page width OK?

--
To email a reply, remove (dash)un(dash). Mail sent to the un
address is considered spam and automatically deleted.

[Jim Ley]

On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 07:56:46 -0600, kchayka <kc*********@sihope.com>
wrote:

Jim Ley wrote:

I believe it's common enough for authors to choose it as a
default suggestion.

If it were simply a suggestion, it wouldn't be so bad, but the huge
majority of these 800px wide sites use table layouts, often nested
tables.

That's still a suggestion, we can do nothing but suggest on the web.
Sure user agents are poor in this area (like they're poor at other
things) but that does not, nor should it invalidate the idea of
suggesting widths.

If we don't suggest anything that some UA's are poor at - we're left
with nothing to use at all, we certainly can't use CSS which user
agents are almost entirely atrocious at.

Jim.
--
comp.lang.javascript FAQ - http://jibbering.com/faq/

[kchayka]

Dennis wrote:

On Mon, 20 Oct 2003 09:27:10 -0500, kchayka <kc*********@sihope.com>
wrote:

So what are the relevant commands that tell you what the user's
preferred text size is?
But are you familiar with the zoom feature in Flash?

Yes, and it has serious flaws. I have submitted bug reports to
Macromedia, but there have been no improvements, nor do I really expect
any. Seems it's not really important to them.
With it you can make EVERYTHING larger, not just text.
And why would I need to zoom everything? Are your eye-candy images
equally as important as the textual content? Or is maintaining your
pixel-perfect layout more important to you than my ability to read it?
Page zoom, like Opera does, has more drawbacks than benefits to me, and
the Flash player's zoom has even more drawbacks than Opera's. I'll take
just plain text zoom any day.
So images (which aren't affected by
the user's preferred text size) also get magnified for the user's
benefit. It seems like kind of a wash in my opinion.

It is not a wash by a long shot. If you ever _had_ to use it, you might
agree.

--
To email a reply, remove (dash)un(dash). Mail sent to the un
address is considered spam and automatically deleted.

[Jim Ley]

On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 08:20:56 -0600, kchayka <kc*********@sihope.com>
wrote:

Dennis wrote:

With it you can make EVERYTHING larger, not just text.
And why would I need to zoom everything?

because Flash like other graphics formats uses position for
information, just changing the size of one part of the text could
dramatically change the meaning of the document. (e.g. in SVG where
you stupidly can override text size in CSS
http://jibbering.com/2002/8/text-mixup.svg )
Are your eye-candy images
equally as important as the textual content?

It's rather ridiculous to suggest that people only use vector (or
other) graphics for eye candy, there are a lot of things you simply
cannot do in HTML, that you need to use graphics for.

Jim.
--
comp.lang.javascript FAQ - http://jibbering.com/faq/

[kchayka]

Jim Ley wrote:

On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 08:20:56 -0600, kchayka <kc*********@sihope.com>
wrote:

Dennis wrote:

With it you can make EVERYTHING larger, not just text.

And why would I need to zoom everything?

because Flash like other graphics formats uses position for
information,

You assume the author is using Flash appropriately. This is usually
not the case. So far, the OP hasn't said anything that leads me to
believe he will be using it for a suitable reason, either. More like he
wants total control over layout, which Flash will definitely give him.

Are your eye-candy images
equally as important as the textual content?

It's rather ridiculous to suggest that people only use vector (or
other) graphics for eye candy, there are a lot of things you simply
cannot do in HTML, that you need to use graphics for.

I'll agree that there are some things that cannot be done (well) in
HTML, but the overwhelming majority of Flash sites do not fall into this
category. Most probably shouldn't be using Flash at all.

--
To email a reply, remove (dash)un(dash). Mail sent to the un
address is considered spam and automatically deleted.

[Jim Ley]

On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 12:01:38 -0600, kchayka <kc*********@sihope.com>
wrote:

Jim Ley wrote:

because Flash like other graphics formats uses position for
information,

You assume the author is using Flash appropriately. This is usually
not the case. So far, the OP hasn't said anything that leads me to
believe he will be using it for a suitable reason, either.

We're not just talking to the OP though, there's other people here
using flash for entirely appropriate purposes, and your responses are
misleading those as much as anything else - if you feel the OP needs
to know about appropriate uses of flash, discuss those, don't mislead
the rest of us!

Jim.
--
comp.lang.javascript FAQ - http://jibbering.com/faq/

[Barry Pearson]

Jonathan Snook wrote:

"Barry Pearson" <ne**@childsupportanalysis.co.uk> wrote in message
news:SP***************@newsfep3-gui.server.ntli.net...

The point about the small sample is well made. Dennis is trying to
solve problems with his web sites. Success or failure depends on
what he does to the web sites, and how his target audience reacts to
what he does. So Dennis' challenge is to get the best advice he can,
develop his web sites accordingly, and hope that the target audience
likes the result.

The problem with 99% of the sites that we as developers create really
get no accurate feedback as to what works and what doesn't. If you
look at the stats and see people leaving after viewing one page, is
it because of the flash or is it because they've figured out what's
on your site and know that it doesn't meet their needs?

Chuckle! I wish I knew!

If I believed what I read on Usenet about my web sites, I would have no
explanation for why my hosting service keeps trying to claim extra money off
me for exceeding my bandwidth limits. (Hm! Are they ripping me off?)

I do some things that may help access. I have progressively stripped out
complications such as JavaScript & roll-over scripts and pop-ups. (I never
used Flash or Frames). And I have done some things that I have been assured
will screw up my chances. Most pages use table-layout. I design for 800 x 600
screens. Etc.

Ultimately, I hide behind the big success stories. For example, the major news
services don't use fancy features such as Flash, etc, And they design for 800
x 600 screens using table-layout. They succeed, so it is unlikely that I will
fail if I copy them. They have massive marketing power. Huge amounts of design
& development resource. Tremendous "pull" - they can't be ignored by users or
UA developers.

I don't feel an urge to be bleeding edge. I'm happy to live within the sphere
of the vast majority.

--
Barry Pearson
http://www.Barry.Pearson.name/photography/
http://www.BirdsAndAnimals.info/
http://www.ChildSupportAnalysis.co.uk/

[Isofarro]

Barry Pearson wrote:

Ultimately, I hide behind the big success stories. For example, the major
news services don't use fancy features such as Flash, etc, And they design
for 800 x 600 screens using table-layout. They succeed,
Because of their website design choices, or because of their brand
recognition. I bet its more the latter, and their design choices in no way
add to that success.
so it is unlikely
that I will fail if I copy them.

Only if you have the same brand recognition level as the websites you copy.
Who are you again?
--
Iso.
FAQs: http://html-faq.com http://alt-html.org http://allmyfaqs.com/
Recommended Hosting: http://www.affordablehost.com/
Web Design Tutorial: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/1010

[kchayka]

Jim Ley wrote:

On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 12:01:38 -0600, kchayka <kc*********@sihope.com>
wrote:

You assume the author is using Flash appropriately. This is usually
not the case. So far, the OP hasn't said anything that leads me to
believe he will be using it for a suitable reason, either.

We're not just talking to the OP though...

Um, I was responding to the OP. You seem to have jumped into the middle
(end?) of this thread, which has been going on for more than 2 weeks
now. I suggest you read some more posts if you want a better idea of
the context.

--
To email a reply, remove (dash)un(dash). Mail sent to the un
address is considered spam and automatically deleted.

[Brian]

Jim Ley wrote:

On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 07:56:46 -0600, kchayka wrote:

If it were simply a suggestion, it wouldn't be so bad, but the huge
majority of these 800px wide sites use table layouts, often nested
tables.
That's still a suggestion,

Table layouts are not a suggestion, really. Data marked up as parts
of a table cannot be made into another element without copying and
reauthoring the document.
we can do nothing but suggest on the web.
And if we do it properly, we don't lock the user into a difficult- or
impossible-to-use situation.
Sure user agents are poor in this area (like they're poor at other
things) but that does not, nor should it invalidate the idea of
suggesting widths.
CSS, anyone?
If we don't suggest anything that some UA's are poor at - we're left
with nothing to use at all, we certainly can't use CSS
We can't? Someone should have told me before I used it on several web
sites.
which user agents are almost entirely atrocious at.

I guess my mileage varies. I find Mozilla and Opera to be fairly good
at it. IE 5.x/Mac seems pretty decent, too.

--
Brian
follow the directions in my address to email me

[Nikolaos Giannopoulos]

Barry Pearson wrote:

Chuckle! I wish I knew!

If I believed what I read on Usenet about my web sites, I would have no
explanation for why my hosting service keeps trying to claim extra money off
me for exceeding my bandwidth limits. (Hm! Are they ripping me off?)

Out of curiosity what is your bandwidth limit?

Ours is 20GB and some would argue that this is on the low side. So
let's take a meager 1GB limit - considering that images consitute the
bulk of your site and you have more than once mentioned that you try to
get them to be no more than 100K... this means that you are getting the
equivalent traffic of 10,000 requests for your images - per month - with
a meager google PR of 3 and 1 and no back links for your first 2 listed
sites respectively. Good job... mind sharing your secret :O

If its your last site with a google PR5 - which although it seems more
popular has very little graphics... well you can do the math.

I'd say offhand your getting ripped off... or something ;-)

--Nikolaos

[Jim Ley]

On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 06:17:20 -0600, kchayka <kc*********@sihope.com>
wrote:

Jim Ley wrote:

I simply do not agree with such a blanket statement, reading across
more than 800 pixels or so I find impossible (regardless of text size
it's the actual scanning of the eye which is my problem)
The problem is the number of characters per line, not the number of
pixels. I need a larger than average text size and an 800px width
restriction often _causes_ readability problems.

So override the 800px suggestion - however for me it's not text size,
within all reasonable reading sizes for me from 0.8em to 2.5em or so
800px is too wide, I have trouble scanning left right with my eyes,
presumably I have less trouble scanning up down. Of course not
everyone is the same - I was just trying to give some perspective of
why I think people choose a size around 800px for their pages, as I
don't believe it is purely a tight visual control.
IMO, this
is a far worse readability problem than lines that are a bit long.
For you sure, you need to override the width sizes too - overriding
bits of CSS but not others often causes problems.
OK fine, but if that content is text, set a max width in em or ex units,
not a fixed with in pixels. Use the right tool for the job, and all
that jazz.

but a max-width in em's is not appropriate, because em depends on the
font size, and I believe for a lot of people (based on the sites they
design) my experience of the maximum reading width being independant
to the font size.

Jim.
--
comp.lang.javascript FAQ - http://jibbering.com/faq/

[Barry Pearson]

Nikolaos Giannopoulos wrote:

Barry Pearson wrote:

Chuckle! I wish I knew!

If I believed what I read on Usenet about my web sites, I would have
no explanation for why my hosting service keeps trying to claim
extra money off me for exceeding my bandwidth limits. (Hm! Are they
ripping me off?)

[snip] I'd say offhand your getting ripped off... or something ;-)

On your figures - I agree with you. I will investigate a new hosting service.

(The total bandwidth across a number of sites was claimed to be about 2.5, and
I strongly suspect that search engines are responsible for much of that. One
site of a few 100 pages was rarely more than 2 or 3 days out of date in the
Google cache, which I assume means that Google was indexing it quite often?)

Thanks.

--
Barry Pearson
http://www.Barry.Pearson.name/photography/
http://www.BirdsAndAnimals.info/
http://www.ChildSupportAnalysis.co.uk/

[Nikolaos Giannopoulos]

Barry Pearson wrote:

Nikolaos Giannopoulos wrote:

Barry Pearson wrote:

Chuckle! I wish I knew!

If I believed what I read on Usenet about my web sites, I would have
no explanation for why my hosting service keeps trying to claim
extra money off me for exceeding my bandwidth limits. (Hm! Are they
ripping me off?)

[snip]

I'd say offhand your getting ripped off... or something ;-)

On your figures - I agree with you. I will investigate a new hosting service.

Definately a good idea....

(The total bandwidth across a number of sites was claimed to be about 2.5, and
2.5 what? GB's or MB's? Moreover what's your limit - is it 1 GB?
Whatever the case, if its 2.5 GB's I imagine that they are lying to you
and you can prove it with your access logs.

I strongly suspect that search engines are responsible for much of that. One
I stongly doubt that - google nor any other search engine (unless its
one that does something unusual with image content) does not download
your images. Yes, google indexes them but it only need look at the URI
for that.

site of a few 100 pages was rarely more than 2 or 3 days out of date in the
Google cache, which I assume means that Google was indexing it quite often?)

I strongly doubt that as well - there are debates on how often, in
general, google indexes sites (individually one need only check their
access logs) but I highly doubt it would be as low as every 2 to 3 days
- most people can expect a site to be indexed about once a month.

All this still doesn't explain your 2.5GB bandwith usage for your web
sites. Sounds like someone is playing games with you or your ISP is
working out of his bed room closet.

If you really want to get to the bottom of this then ask them for your
web site access logs and you will see for yourself what requrests were
made. If you counted all the lines with a ".jpg" (each line represents
a http request) in them and multiplied by 100K you should get a rough
value for the bulk of your traffic.

If your ISP made these google claims then run - don't walk - fast ;-)

--Nikolaos

[Dennis]

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 12:40:38 +1100, Mark Parnell
<we*******@clarkecomputers.com.au> wrote:

Sometime around Sun, 26 Oct 2003 17:17:39 -0800, Dennis is reported to have
stated:

On Mon, 20 Oct 2003 12:46:51 +1000, Mark Parnell
<we*******@clarkecomputers.com.au> wrote:

Yes, they do. So? As to why - who knows? Because they are too
narrow-minded, and stuck in the mid 90's? IMHO, much of the reason that
the large sites still have fixed-width, table-based layouts is simply
because of the time and effort that would be required to change it.

Could you post some urls of sites that take advantage of a wide
viewport? I'd like to see how they do it. My suspicion is that it
can't be done well with present day CSS and that THAT's why the big
sites (eg the big buck designers) settle for 800-wide.

Dennis

[Dennis]

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 19:58:22 +0200, Mikko Rantalainen <mi**@st.jyu.fi>
wrote:

While that is true, you must admit that most all the top websites opt
for an "800-wide non-horizontal flowing" format (typically aligned

It's because "others are doing it too". I think the 800 pixels wide rule
comes from early Windows versions often running 800x600 resolution on
low end hardware and with such a small screen, the only sane thing is to
always maximize the browser window.

The 800 pixels wide rule was OK when the "only" way to access it was
with a desktop computer but nowadays we have much more diversity in the
devices used to access the net.

HTML flows great in a downward direction but it just doesn't seem to
want to go "sideways." I don't see any inherent reason why,
historically, we couldn't have instructed our browsers to take our
text and image content and chop it up into columns of specified
widths, and flow it across the viewport horizontally. But, alas, we
opted for a downward flow instead of a "rightward" flow. The 800-wide
standard is not due to convention but to the way html and css have
evolved.

Dennis

[Dennis]

On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 08:20:56 -0600, kchayka <kc*********@sihope.com>
wrote:

It is not a wash by a long shot. If you ever _had_ to use it, you might
agree.

If a web site designer were to make an alternate page for those who
cannot see --or choose not too see-- a web page, is there a preferred
format or is plain HTML the best? Is there a conventional way of
alerting the user to the alternate page's existence?

Dennis

[Dennis]

On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 12:01:38 -0600, kchayka <kc*********@sihope.com>
wrote:

You assume the author is using Flash appropriately. This is usually
not the case. So far, the OP hasn't said anything that leads me to
believe he will be using it for a suitable reason, either. More like he
wants total control over layout, which Flash will definitely give him.

"Total control over layout" is not a suitable reason?

Dennis

[Dennis]

On Sat, 18 Oct 2003 04:44:06 -0500, kchayka <kc*********@sihope.com>
wrote:

The very nature of Flash encourages
inaccessible, inflexible layouts. The user's preference settings are
not part of the equation, thus Flash cannot adapt to the user's settings.

This means that you will create a site that only "works" in a very
narrow band of screen resolution, window size and text size. The rest
of us will be out of luck. If your goal is usability, then your best
bet is a liquid layout that adjusts well to different window and text
sizes. This Flash cannot do, at least I have never seen it done.

You have to use Flash's programming language, actionScript, to truly
adapt a flash movie to the user's viewport and not just have the movie
scale to fit. I haven't seen people do this, but if you look at the
language you'll see that it's totally do-able. It isn't automatically
though --you have to code it in. Why people don't use Flash this way
is a mystery to me. They invariably opt for a fixed size movie. But
it's not a limitation of the program itself.

Dennis

[Dennis]

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 19:29:08 +0200, Mikko Rantalainen <mi**@st.jyu.fi>
wrote:

What graphics?
I was thinking of someone who is visually impaired but can still see.
Like those who would use large print books. Images can be an
important part of the information that's on a web page, and my point
is that even if a user elects to have the font sizes large, the images
will remain just as small, and presumably they'd benefit if they were
make larger as well.
(The reason I call those as flash "sites" is that I really cannot
consider something being a "site" if that has only one page.

Most flash developers take advantage of the "frame" structure of flash
and "do it all in a single flash movie." I agree with your point, and
inasmuch as I use flash at my site (which will be considerable), I'm
breaking it down into smaller movies, each of which will have their
own html in order to make navigation and bookmarking intuitive and
consistent with the user's experience.

Dennis

[Dennis]

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 13:53:01 +1100, Mark Parnell
<we*******@clarkecomputers.com.au> wrote:

Not if a new HDTV was free of charge.

But I have no way of getting it home. Or it won't fit in my loungeroom.

The Macromedia technicians will deliver it to your doorstep and set it
all up for you. If you loungeroom isn't big enough, their
construction crew will expand your room to make it fit. Not bad for
free.

Dennis

[Dennis]

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 07:10:30 +0100, Christoph Paeper <cr*****@gmx.net>
wrote:

Yeah, right. Why should they? Most of current Flash content on the Web is
pink noise and there're no signs for it getting better, thus it would be
extremely stupid for a SE provider to put a lot of energy and money into
attempts to parse it properly.

I hope Google never gets into deciding whether to index something
based on someone's editorial opinion of its worth. If it's there,
parse it.

[Dennis]

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 12:40:38 +1100, Mark Parnell
<we*******@clarkecomputers.com.au> wrote:

If I knew what honery meant, I might be offended. :-)
I'm honery and I'm going to keep on spelling it "honery" no matter
what anybody says. I got my principles.
Why pay money for a program that stops _some_ flash ads, when I can
uninstall Flash for free and miss them all? I have seen very few
legitimate uses for Flash, and many mis-uses, so see no reason to have it
installed. If that means I miss out on your site, fine.

If you are someone who enjoys cinema, you MUST be drawn in by good
flash sites. Graphics + motion + sound + imagination = fun. What's
wrong with a little fun?

[Brian]

Dennis wrote:

If you are someone who enjoys cinema,
I do. And when I'm in the mood, I go to the cinema.
you MUST be drawn in by good flash sites.

You MUST be joking. How is some 4cm x 6cm Flash animation thingy on my
computer screen anything close to a film on a cinema screen? How
could my tiny computer speakers compare with those in the movie house?

When I want to see a movie, I don't go online, except perhaps to find
out what's playing locally. And in that case, I don't want some
rediculous Flash "movie" for links, or to display animated graphics of
the cinema's logo. I just want to know what's playing, thank you.

--
Brian
follow the directions in my address to email me

[I V]

On Fri, 31 Oct 2003 20:57:10 -0800, Dennis wrote:

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 13:53:01 +1100, Mark Parnell
<we*******@clarkecomputers.com.au> wrote:

Not if a new HDTV was free of charge.

But I have no way of getting it home. Or it won't fit in my loungeroom.

The Macromedia technicians will deliver it to your doorstep and set it
all up for you. If you loungeroom isn't big enough, their
construction crew will expand your room to make it fit. Not bad for
free.

So Macromedia will write me a Flash plugin for non-x86 Unix? For Lynx? For
free? Yeah, that wouldn't be bad, but it's obviously untrue.

--
"- Penny, I worry that you are loosing heart... You are not the sweet little
girl I once knew. Where's your sense of wonder?
- Currently flowing into a sanitary napkin... Guess where my childlike
innocence and idle dreams are currently wedged. Come on, I dare you."
http://www.huh.34sp.com/

[kchayka]

Dennis wrote:

I don't see any inherent reason why,
historically, we couldn't have instructed our browsers to take our
text and image content and chop it up into columns of specified
widths, and flow it across the viewport horizontally.

Probably because it's harder to read on screen like this, at least for
LTR languages like English? Maybe because other apps don't normally
function this way? If my word processor made me read all docs like
that, I'd replace it in a heartbeat. It's hard enough reading the
occassional landscape-oriented doc. I would never choose to read
everything this way.

There are too many variations in browsing environments to make this work
anyway. The best you could get would be something that might be usable
in a certain minimum viewport size combined with a certain maximum text
size. You can't count on either of these, so the result would be either
sub-optimal or unusable for everyone outside these limits.

--
To email a reply, remove (dash)un(dash). Mail sent to the un
address is considered spam and automatically deleted.

[Christoph Paeper]

*Dennis* <theonlyDennis@removeForSpam_mindspring.com>:

Why people don't use Flash this way is a mystery to me.

But you do understand why a considerable amount of people take this among
others as a reason for disabling the Flash plug-in and it's thus unwise to
rely on Flash for a web-site?

--
Useless Fact #10:
Percentage of Americans who have visited Disneyland/Disney World: 70%.

[Christoph Paeper]

*Dennis* <theonlyDennis@removeForSpam_mindspring.com>:

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 13:53:01 +1100, Mark Parnell

[If the Flash plug-in was an HDTV set.]

But I have no way of getting it home. Or it won't fit in my loungeroom.

The Macromedia technicians will deliver it to your doorstep and set it
all up for you. If you loungeroom isn't big enough, their construction
crew will expand your room to make it fit.

They'll get me a new processor and mainboard so that the nasty Flash plug-in
won't ever again acquire a stupid 90-100% CPU time, no matter what it's
displaying? Cool.

--
Useless Fact #3:
Every day more money is printed for Monopoly than the US Treasury.

[Christoph Paeper]

*Dennis* <theonlyDennis@removeForSpam_mindspring.com>:

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 07:10:30 +0100, Christoph Paeper <cr*****@gmx.net>

Most of current Flash content on the Web is pink noise and there're no signs
for it getting better, thus it would be extremely stupid for a SE provider
to put a lot of energy and money into attempts to parse it properly.
I hope Google never gets into deciding whether to index something
based on someone's editorial opinion of its worth.

With the very same argumentation, you could want Google to download every
MP3 out there, extract the ID3 tag, which is only makes a small percentage
of the file size, and make that information searchable.
If it's there, parse it.

That's nothing you get for free. Even if it's easily possible, there must be
some value of doing it--parsing millions of Flash ads and information-free
intro movies hasn't. Equally proprietary Office documents and PDFs OTOH do
provide valueable information in general, so it makes sense to parse them.

Furthermore the semantics that e.g. HTML provides makes SE parsing a lot
easier.

--
If you can't convince them, confuse them. (Harry S. Truman)

[kchayka]

Dennis wrote:

On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 12:01:38 -0600, kchayka <kc*********@sihope.com>
wrote:

You assume the author is using Flash appropriately. This is usually
not the case. So far, the OP hasn't said anything that leads me to
believe he will be using it for a suitable reason, either. More like he
wants total control over layout, which Flash will definitely give him.

"Total control over layout" is not a suitable reason?

When the only reason for this level of control is the designer's layout
whim, I think not. Show where there is a relationship between elements
that must be strictly maintained to be meaningful, and I would probably
say yes.

--
To email a reply, remove (dash)un(dash). Mail sent to the un
address is considered spam and automatically deleted.

[Mikko Rantalainen]

Christoph Paeper / 2003-11-02 02:44:

*Dennis* <theonlyDennis@removeForSpam_mindspring.com>:

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 07:10:30 +0100, Christoph Paeper <cr*****@gmx.net>

Most of current Flash content on the Web is pink noise and there're no signs
for it getting better, thus it would be extremely stupid for a SE provider
to put a lot of energy and money into attempts to parse it properly.

If it's there, parse it.

That's nothing you get for free. Even if it's easily possible, there must be
some value of doing it--parsing millions of Flash ads and information-free
intro movies hasn't. Equally proprietary Office documents and PDFs OTOH do
provide valueable information in general, so it makes sense to parse them.

Plus, there should be *no need* to parse flash animations. If the
content author followed recommendations, he would provide
*alternative* content as plain HTML and SE already indexes that
content. What else could the content author want? If he isn't
following the recommendations who we should blaim then? SE spider
for not parsing their animation? What next - a parser that
identifies text strings from background images?

--
Mikko

[Andrew Thompson]

"Mikko Rantalainen" <mi**@st.jyu.fi> wrote in message
news:bo**********@mordred.cc.jyu.fi...

Christoph Paeper / 2003-11-02 02:44:

*Dennis* <theonlyDennis@removeForSpam_mindspring.com>:

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 07:10:30 +0100, Christoph Paeper <cr*****@gmx.net>

........If the
content author followed recommendations, he would provide
*alternative* content as plain HTML and SE already indexes that
content. What else could the content author want? If he isn't
following the recommendations who we should blaim then? SE spider
for not parsing their animation? What next - a parser that
identifies text strings from background images?

I can imagine the form spammers would get excited
at the prospect of circumventing the 'type the secret
number in the image' form verifiers.. :(

--
Andrew Thompson
http://www.AThompson.info/
http://www.PhySci.org/
http://www.1point1C.org/

[Mark Parnell]

Sometime around Fri, 31 Oct 2003 19:48:07 -0800, Dennis is reported to have
stated:

Could you post some urls of sites that take advantage of a wide
viewport? I'd like to see how they do it. My suspicion is that it
The size of the viewport is irrelevant. In theory, a well designed site
will flow (hence "fluid" design) to fit the available canvas, whatever size
that may be. You need only look as far as the sigs of many of the regulars
here for examples, but here are a few:

http://www.dorward.me.uk/
http://williamtasso.com/
http://steve.pugh.net/

And of course the one in my sig. ;-)
can't be done well with present day CSS and that THAT's why the big
What's to be done? If you don't specify a width at all, the page will
adjust to the screen width. How much better could you get?
sites (eg the big buck designers) settle for 800-wide.

No, they settle for 800px wide because that's what was done in 1995. And
unfortunately, that's what is still being taught in many web design
courses. The web itself has moved on, and it is only a matter of time
before these big sites either catch up or get left behind.

--
Mark Parnell
http://www.clarkecomputers.com.au

[Nikolaos Giannopoulos]

Dennis wrote:

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 12:40:38 +1100, Mark Parnell
<we*******@clarkecomputers.com.au> wrote:

Why pay money for a program that stops _some_ flash ads, when I can
uninstall Flash for free and miss them all? I have seen very few
legitimate uses for Flash, and many mis-uses, so see no reason to have it
installed. If that means I miss out on your site, fine.

If you are someone who enjoys cinema, you MUST be drawn in by good
flash sites. Graphics + motion + sound + imagination = fun. What's
wrong with a little fun?

You have to be kidding right? You call these "good" sites?

It's interesting that you leave out:

usability + interactivity

in your equation. This omission demonstrates the large problem with
flash sites and that's that their author's develop them primarily for
entertainment purposes and forget everything else.

Interestingy enough I think you almost had me believing that your
intentions were different but alas it doesn't seem so.

I don't know about you but seeing a movie is a pretty passive experience
- I'm not sure why I would want a passive experience when I'm surfing
the www (unless of course I'm watching an online movie trailer or
something). Why not simply turn on the TV instead of your computer?
Finally, you need to also take into consideration that Flash is
delivered as a plug-in and morever plug-ins have bad user experience
stigma associated to them; even if the installers have gotten better and
the systems don't require reboots anymore - people will always have
security concerns, be reluctant based on not wanting additional software
on their system or due to internet viruses, and / or may have this
desire to "retain" control of their computer (and I mean this from the
less knowledgable user base).

The way I see it there are one of two typical paths down the flash
development road:

(1) a) Build a flash site without useful content
b) Don't care if only a select group can access it
c) Don't care if many search engines can't index it

OR

(2) a) Build a flash site with useful content
b) Realize that you may want it to be more acessible
c) Realize that you may want more search engines to
index it
d) Develop a parallel non-flash site
e) Realize that the non-flash site useful content is
indexed by more search engines
f) Realize that the maintenance effort to keep the two
in sync is not worth it
g) Drop the flash site

--Nikolaos

[Simon]

Andrew Thompson wrote:
<<Snipped>>

Client: "Hello, I'd like a web site designed please"

Me: "Sure, what did you have in mind?"

Client: "Well, I'd like a lot of animation to make it stand out"

Me: "Ahh ok, I gather you don't want a good ranking in search engines?"

Client: "Huh?? of course I do!"

Me: "If your content is in flash the search engines won't read it"

Client: "umm ok, html first page and flash the rest"

Me: "Ok, so you want a page rank of zero and to appear maybe number 900
out of 1000 sites"

Client "Huh?"

Me: "When the search engine does a deep crawl of your site it will only
see the text on the welcome page so anyone who has more than 1 page will
stand a far greater chance of getting waaaay higher than you"

Client: "Pah, who cares do it!"

Me: "Ok, oh... according to the Royal National Institution of the Blind
1 in 7 people on the net are disabled in some way. Taking that into
account you could be losing a lot of clients"

Client: "Pah, small percentage"

Me: "10% of 1 million visitors is still 100,000 people who can't access
the site".

Client: "Pah, who cares about them either"

Me: "You will, it is illegal in the USA, Australia and the UK to have a
site not accessible to the disabled. AOL and the Australian Olympics web
site have already been sued and lost"

Client: "But I love the animation's on sites"

Me: "Latest research shows that most surfers now sub consciously blank
anything animated as the brain will be almost certain it's advertising"

Client: "But I read that Flash has a user base of 97%"

Me: "Only those with newer browsers, java enabled and even then if 1 in
7 are disabled chances are they have it installed at home but can't view
it. That's not even taking into account those who have installed but
instantly hit the back button because they are sick to death of 5 minute
load times and poor flash design."

Client: "Ok, what do you suggest"

Me: "Well if you don't care about the Law, the disabled, the instant
hate of anything flash, the brain ignoring anything animating at
subconscious level, the people who don't have flash, the people who have
it turned off, the people who use old computers who don't have flash,
the people who have machines too slow to run flash then I reckon you're
onto a winner".

Client: "Woot, then lets do it!"

Me: "Sigh..... /click"

Client: "Hello?.....hello??....HELLO??"

How was that?

--

Simon Day
Free desktop wallpapers of Torbay at: http://www.simonday.com