Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

"If that wasn’t enough, the explosion of smart phones and tablets has made the job of the web designer even harder. Designers can no longer assume a fixed-width canvas..."

They never should have, and I'd say it's probably easier in some respects with smartphones because, while there's a multitude, they're all fixed, and you can generally target, say, 3-6, and cover a huge variety. And people generally can't change their font sizes.

Compare with dozens of monitor and window sizes on desktops. 13, 15, 19, 20+, with varying types of DPI and available fonts on systems. Not so much monitor sizes I mean, but... is the browser window full screen, or partial? People resizing windows would lose info, or not see it in the first place, and get lost. Back in the early days the "256-color palette" was considered a requirement for many projects.

While it's a hassle to develop for various size phones, it's still a more controlled and uniform set of sizes, imo; it just takes a lot more work.

> Compare with dozens of monitor and window sizes on desktops

In practice, I think many developers just choose a fixed with, e.g. 960px, and leave it at that. The desktop window size and DPI can be largely ignored at that point. Phones and tablets really did throw a wrench into that easy solution. But I can't complain, because users should have access to devices with smaller screens.

they didn't years ago. it's standardized some, but it was a nightmare 15 years ago. this "oh no there's so many devices!" is what I hear from people that never had to implement one site for IE3, NS2 and WebTV at the same time.

>In practice, I think many developers just choose a fixed with, e.g. 960px, and leave it at that

Yes, but they were wrong to do that then, and the world is better off now that mobile devices are forcing those people to do things less badly.

> they were wrong to do that then

Why was that wrong in a pre-mobile world? In many cases, using the entire width of the window would be a big mistake. For example, in a typical blog layout, you might have a main content column and a narrower sidebar column. If you expanded these to fill the entire width of the window, you could end up with lines of text that are, say, 1600 pixels wide. Which would be bad for usability and accessibility.[1]

[1]http://webaim.org/techniques/textlayout/#column_width

Because we already had tons of different display devices with tons of different sizes and resolutions. People just said "it works on my screen so that's good enough". You don't need to have text fill the entire width of the display to have a site work everywhere, I don't understand why you brought that up at all.

> Because we already had tons of different display devices with tons of different sizes and resolutions.

What kinds of devices are you referring to? (Remember, we're talking about the days before mobile was a big enough market to justify making mobile versions of websites.)

Do you mean Blackberries? I'd humbly submit that, from a business perspective, Blackberry support wasn't an important goal for many sites.

Or do you mean laptops? There was a long time when mobile wasn't big and just about every laptop supported at least 960px.

> You don't need to have text fill the entire width of the display to have a site work everywhere, I don't understand why you brought that up at all.

I thought you were suggesting that the pre-mobile, 960px technique was bad for large screens. It sounds like I was mistaken, and you're actually referring to smaller screens.

>What kinds of devices are you referring to?

Everything from monitors to PDAs to laptops of various form factors. Even as late as 2007, 20% of displays seen in web stats were 800x600 or smaller. There were also plenty of devices that could have accessed the web but people didn't bother because the web was so broken with IE 1024 crapsites. The iphone happened in 2007. There was no period where the number of people getting boned by fixed 960px sites was insignificant.

>Remember, we're talking about the days before mobile was a big enough market to justify making mobile versions of websites.

That is begging the question. You can't assume X as a premise to demonstrate X. 20%+ devices were smaller than 960px. It took (and still takes) no extra effort to design a website correctly rather than with a fixed grid. Just as it took no extra effort to design a website correctly rather than for IE only. It is not a co-incidence that "best viewed in IE 5" and "best viewed in 1024x768" buttons were best buds. Both stem from the same source.

If the 20% figure you gave was accurate for a particular site, then your conclusion would be absolutely correct. That particular site shouldn't have done a fixed-width 960px layout.

However, as someone who was a webmaster in 2007, I can tell you that the 20% figure was not even close to true for my particular sites. Other webmasters I knew told me the same.

So I'd say that this, like all things in web design, admits of no hard-and-fast rule. Rather, the answer is "it depends." In 2007, it depended on what your analytics were telling you. Most sites nowadays have a strong business need to support phone-size displays, but even today, not every single site does.

>if I make a site that turns off people using low resolutions, I don't get many visitors using low resolutions

This sounds fairly obvious doesn't it?

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp

While it's a hassle to develop for various size phones

It's even easier if you adopt the mobile first approach,though it's not valid for every project,it's valid for most projects.Thinking mobile afterward is hard.

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