Robert J. O'Hara wrote:
If you have an interest in captioned figures and/or traditional
typography take a look and see if you can identify any problems with
the page.
Robert,
I looked at the page with IE 5.5 and NN 7.1 maximized on a 600 X 800 screen.
I recommend adding min-width to the images. On both browsers when I
narrowed the screen to cell-phone size, the smaller images went to 1
pixel and then vanished. The min-width should be expressed in ems and be
equal to the longest word in the caption/legend, to avoid text flopping
outside the figure border (which will also happen on a 'medium' sized
screen at very large text sizes).
This will limit, at the extremes, the extent to which you can retain
your 'optimum' proportion of text and image space across the page width,
but you've already accepted that limitation with regard to the maximum
useful size for an image, so the trauma should be minimal.
See
http://pages.prodigy.net/chris_beall/sandbox/index.html. Each
navigation image has a caption (button). As the screen size is reduced,
the image will reduce UNTIL THE BUTTON SIZE IS REACHED, but no further.
(When that limit is reached, the 'figures' spill gradually from a
horizontal layout to a vertical one).
I did some experiments on image scaling and concluded that an image can
be scaled to 2X its 'natural' size without annoying pixellation. So I
recommend that you try to guess the size of the largest window any user
will employ and process the natural image to be about half that size.
Others will caution you that browsers, unlike image-specific tools like
PhotoShop, do not do a great job of scaling images, even to smaller than
'natural' sizes. You must be content to accept this if you use this
technique.
On NN 7.1 I tried changing the text size. The 4th image (fall leaves)
did not seem to scale with the text reduced to 50% or enlarged to 200%.
Chris Beall
