Can pages be made to fit 800x600 & 640x480?

Or other sizes for that matter. It seems that it would be a standard that a page would fit any pixel sized screen. Can this be done, or is it a future technology? Gasp, if it's the future I'll have a million files to change.

Dan

www.wordservice.org

[muijefr]

As you probably know your home page works just fine using 640x480 or 800x600 monitor settings. Having said that I'm sure it works in 1024x768+. If your page content is centered and works at 640x480 it will work at monitor settings that are greater. Try to use <table align=center... rather than <center><table>...</center> as much as possible. Text in a centered table will be reconfigured by the browser depending on the HTML TABLE and monitor settings. The display visual appeal will depend on the table specifications. Is the table set to width=90% or width=600 pixels. You pays your money and takes your chances.

If you design from the top down, that is from/for 1600x1200 or 1280x1024, you may be creating a navigation problems for monitors of a lesser setting (top to bottom and left to right scrolling). Imaging gets smaller and smaller as the monitor setting increase and gets larger and larger as you move down the scale. A 800x600 image fits ok for monitors set at 800x600 or greater but create navigation requirements for 640x480 setting but a 640x480 images views fine at 640x480 and greater (I know browsers obscure part of the display area and don't render the full screen size but this is for example convience).

There are JavaScripts, and I sure most any other computer language, that enable the evaluation of the monitor settings. But what design problems does that imply. You may not want to go there. Someone will for sure suggest writing the HTML dynamically but here again how many variations do you want to accommodate.

[bettyfordclinic]

Tables are the easiest way of making pages fit any monitor size. The best thing is to understand how tables work (limitations etc) and then design your page with those limitations in mind.

I've included a link to one of my pages below, which uses a combo of frames and tables (old old html to create a page designed for various monitor sizes (though I've set my min as 800 600, a personal decision).

I visited your site, and it will look good on any monitor due to the centering of information. If you wanted to go further you cuold set the three columns to all operate on percentages and thus fill the screen more. But it works ok as it is....

bfc

an example

Percents instead of pixils. Duh! Now I have to go and change a hundred pages. Thanks for helping.

Dan

[muijefr]

doesn't sound like much help. Are you sure that's what you need to do. If pixels worked for 640x480 it will work for/at higher monitor settings and a 600 pixel wide table gets real wide at 100% of 1024x768 and perhaps very short. Do some testing before global editing 100 documents.

The first address is one that I've changed.

http://www.wordservice.org/1st%20pag...esymbolism.htm

The second one I havn't chaged yet.

http://www.wordservice.org/Babylon/bs3000.htm

If you are viewing with 800x600 one table fills the page the other does not. If you are viewing with 600x480 both fill the page. The only differance is the font size in comparrison to the table size. Viewing from 800x600 versus 600x480 the font is smaller on the 800x600. I figure I can live with that and I don't see any chnge towards hiogher pixils than 800x600 for the masses anytime soon. Expecially in newly developing countries which I hope to target in the future.

Dan

[muijefr]

Well the one you changed looks very good at both frequencies but along the way you might think about including a few pixels of cellpadding to move your text away from the borders. The background on the one you changed is playing tricks when view at 1024x768 and your table got wide and short as I though it might. You might what to move to bgcolors or tiling images for your backgrounds. Keep the faith.

[bettyfordclinic]

Dan,

They both really do work fine. The one you've changed now expands to fit my 1024 768 monitor perfectly, and the other one sites centred at a fixed width. I guess you'll go with whichever one you prefer, but there are a couple of things you shoud bear in midnwhen going with percentages:

1. Ensure that your text isn't stretched too wide, which can make it less pleasant to read from one line to the next (eye-tracking has to travel further) (use 80% or 90% values as a compromise).
2. There is no 2.

Oh, and do lots of tests before you go changing all 100 pages. And yes, the backgrounds seems a little wonky.....

bfc

people in the world that us 1024x768, and the world will remain that way for the next 50 years (Lol).

bfc, what does wonky mean?

Oh and thanks for the interest and help.

Dan

[bettyfordclinic]

1024 768??? do you means that's too big or two small???

In work I used a 1280 1024 monitor, which I had to overscan to 1600 1200 for complex jobs. And if you think that's bad my boss used TWO 1280 1024 22 inch monitors on his single G4. I'm actually a bit limited with my home 1024 for web work....

I took a screen grab of how the page looks on my Mac. It's a 156k gif:
here it is
You can see that the background images are a little off down the bottom of the page. Hence the "wonky"!!!

bfc

Thanks bfc, I guess Im going to have to get a bigger moniter so's I can see what it looks like at 1600x 1200. My little fourteen inch won't go above 800x600. I think I remedied the wonky problem on this new page by putting a border around the background image.
http://www.wordservice.org/Q%20&%20S...or/usa2000.htm

I wonder that all this stuff will be futile with the technologies they will come up wit twenty years from now.

Dan

[bettyfordclinic]

I woudn't worry too much about 1600 1200 yet!!! 800 600 and 1024 768 are the most popular screen sizes by far.

I looked at the new test page, and although I would have imagined that background image to have been quite large, it loaded in pretty fast (56k modem). There are lots of ways around getting pages to scale to fit monitors, and the best one is to design the page with scaling in mind from the start. This said, scaling isn't the be all and end all of things, and the only real compilications you're having are to do with background images. If you were using solids colour backgrounds the pages would work perfectly straight away!!! (but the flag did look great)

bfc

Dan,
I really like the tiled cloud background. One very minor thing. If you use about 8 pixels of cell padding, it keeps the text from looking like it's about to fall off the side of the page in those areas where a line of text runs the full width of the cell. Just a personal preference, but I like a little "white space" at the sides.
Overall, it's a fine looking site!

DCR

This is what i use to do
(Now i only design pages for 800x600 because 50% of web surfers have that resolution)

<script language="JavaScript">
function loadContent(file){
var head = document.getElementsByTagName('head').item(0)
var scriptTag = document.getElementById('loadScript');
if(scriptTag) head.removeChild(scriptTag);
script = document.createElement('script');
script.src = file;
script.type = 'text/javascript';
script.id = 'loadScript';
head.appendChild(script)
}


loadContent('content.js')
//The array content should be here i.e.
//content[0] = "My First DOM Table i got from a powweb forum";
//content[1] = "i love http://www.impact-torah.com";

if(screen.width == "640"){
var oWidth = "570";
}
if(screen.width == "800"){
var oWidth = "780";
}
if(screen.width == "1024"){
var oWidth = "880" // or 980
}

outPut_table = "";
outPut_table += "<table width="+oWidth+" cellspacing='0' cellpadding='0'>";
outPut_table += " <tr>";
outPut_table += "<td>"+content[0]+"</td>";
outPut_table += " </tr>";
outPut_table += " <tr>";
outPut_table += "<td>"+content[1]+"</td>";
outPut_table += " </tr>";
outPut_table += "</table>";

document.write(outPut_table);
</script>


Been so long since i wrote in DHTML/Javascript so probably some errors... Anys ways thats what i did.

This script also works great with server side language.

[Jeff321]

I didn't think ANYBODY used 640x480 anymore!