From: Kansas City, MO , USA Insane since: Feb 2002
posted 11-15-2006 08:03
i wont be in the near future because even though a new version of ie is out, many people wont switch yet, or ever... just like how there are still a fair amount of people out there using 800*600 resolutions
Don't know why people use a 800x600 screen resolution but I do know why my browsing area is usually ~850x880.
My screen is set to 1280x1024, my tabs are on the right hand side so I can read their title even when I have dozens of tabs, and I have a panel ( notes, widgets, links, infos, feeds, ... ) open on the left hand side.
As for PNG, I guess it's fairly safe for personnal web sites to now say 'screw you' to people using obsolete browsers ( be it by ignorance or by choice ), as long as the content is accessible.
One of the main reasons people use lower resolutions is that the letters become so small at higher resolutions, they become very difficult to read. This is true for all text on the screen, not just in browsers and while it is fairly easy to change the text size in a browser, most people don't bother to make the adjustment and is harder or impossible to do in many other applications.
My screen is set to 1024x768 because any higher and I wouldn't be able to read the letters on the screen. Several people have asked me how I can read the screen at that resolution.
Also, I browse in a window that is about 550x550. I tend to stay away from pages that will force me to make the browser full screen and I run from pages that won't fit on the browser at full screen. (Yes, I'm starting to run into a number of pages that have a horizontal scroll bar even with the browser window at full screen.)
There was someone talking about why the Mac received such a low level of acceptance among the business community back in the mid to late 1980s. He pointed out that the majority of people making business' decisions about how money would be spent were people in their 50s who needed glasses to read. At that time the Mac had such a small screen size and the fonts tended to be so small that it was difficult for anyone who needed reading glasses to read the screen.
There was never any scientific evidence that this was a major factor, but the argument made a lot of sense and probably had some validity. I see the same kind of thing happening with the web. There are lots of web pages being designed that do not take into account the ability of any (except those with perfect eye sight) to access their information.
I assume that the people here are more aware than most of the need for accessibility on web sites, but questions like "Why would anyone want to browse the web with their browser set to anything less than yyyyy x yyyyy?" are indicative of the mindset of those who don't consider variability in accessibility in their designs.
As far as png goes, Internet explorer has been able to display png images for a number of years. I know IE6 could and I think IE5 had about the same ability as IE6. They just had limited ability to display pngs with transparency and had limited or no capability to properly display alpha channels. The impetus that generate png has gone away since the patent on the compression algorithm of gif images expired two or three years ago. It looks as if we will be seeing gif images on web pages for the foreseeable future.
As far as upgrading to IE7 goes, I don't plan on ever upgrading to it because it only runs on Windows-XP. which I consider to be an evil operating system. All my machinces either run Windows-2000 of Linux. Since IE7 won't run on those operating systems, I don't see getting it anytime soon.
hyperbole: IE7 works from Win2k SP2 but personaly I passed. There's no way for me download 250mb ( I'm using Win2k SP1 ) to install a browser that doesn't even come close to FF2 or OP9. IIRC 'proper' PNG support came with IE5.5 via the use of a proprietary *eeek* CSS filter: property
Thanks poi, I didn't know it would work with Windows 2000. I'm not interested in it because I use Firefox and right now am far more involved with application development than with web implementation. However, if I get back in to web work, I'll try to down load IE7 at that time.
reisio, I agree that PNG has worked very well for a number of years. I have wanted to see it accepted as the way to store graphics for a long time.
I was reading a mailing list yesterday where someone asked a question about PNG and several developers (whom I consider to be pretty knowledgeable in HTML, CSS and other web related stuff) told him to use GIF instead. When asked why the only answer anyone gave was PNGs don't compress any smaller than GIFs so why not use GIF..
While that seems like a silly reason not to use PNG, I do believe that it takes more work and knowledge on the part of the developer to use PNGs properly because the tools they are used to (like Fireworks, Photoshop, and InterNET Explorer) don't support PNG as well as they should.
The last time I checked (six months to a year ago) you need extra tools to get the most out of PNGs. If, for example, I create a PNG image in Photoshop, it will be larger than the corresponding GIF or JPEG image until I use an external compression program to reduce the PNG down to less than either the GIF or JPG.
It's a small extra step, but enough to keep many people from accepting PNG as a better way to store graphics.
quote:When asked why the only answer anyone gave was PNGs don't compress any smaller than GIFs so why not use GIF..
Pardon my French, but WTF ? PNG DO compress better, in many cases, than GIF.
It is true that PhotoShop, until CS, didn't compress PNG very efficiently and, as you said, people had to use external tools such PNGCrush, PNGOut and OptiPNG. Which task can be automated as explained in Web Applications : Optimizing PNG Graphics for Device. But it's over now. It's been for like 2 years.
Yes, poi, I agree PNG do and have for a long time compressed better than GIF. I have been enamored of the format since I first ran across in it in the early 90s, but as you point out it wasn't until CS that you could get that kind of compression from Photoshop. I was responding to reisio's question "PNG has worked well for years so why hasn't it replaced GIF?"
I think with new tools like Photoshop CS and Paint Shop we will see more people using PNGs because it is now easier to do so, but that will take time and these products are only a year or so old. It takes longer than that for a fundamental change such as switching to a new graphics format to take place. Especially when you have organizations like MircoSoft sniping from the side lines: claiming to support the new format but sabotaging their browser so it looks like the image format is broken.
We think of GIF as the old establish standard, and it is. How long was it around before it was accepted as a standard format for storing graphics. I seem to remember that the GIF format was created in the late '70s but wasn't popularized until the early '90s. PNG was created in the early '90s. Most people didn't even hear of it for ten years after that. Here we are fifteen years later and it is starting to see the kind of popularity many of us have hoped it would attain. Fifteen years isn't really that long to wait for these kinds of a changes.
From: The Land of one Headlight on. Insane since: May 2001
posted 11-17-2006 19:42
poi:
So it did get be me. <lol> I still have an early version of corel photopaint which wasn't a half bad program... except for the interface which just wasn't very friendly... at least to me it wasn't.
___________________________________________________________________________
If you're not living life on the edge, you're taking up too much room.
posted 11-15-2006 04:41
