terratogen wrote:
Acidus wrote:
I don't want a different customized UI's for every user or user agent. I want adaptive UIs.
My mom is not going to design her own style style for a website. But when my mom bumbs the font size of http://www.cnn.com up 2 levels and suddenly the menu bar is going off the screen and text doesn't fit in boxes anymore, that's is a problem.
When a user enters in a bunch of text into a comment block and it appears as one long line going right over the pretty floating table of content, thats a problem.
When I have a 1400x900 screen and a blog renders as a thin vertical strip maybe 700 pixels across thats just silly.
This can be fixed, and it doesn't require you hacking around IE6 lacks of PNG transparency or Safari's crazy JavaScript. It's making smart decisions about how you define the layout of a page.
An adaptive UI might not be that simple. If the blog did adapt its margins to fit that width to 1400 pixels you might end up with several very long line of texts. The more words per line you allow the harder the text becomes to read from line to line. The adaptation might not be much better than the re-flow of the menu. If you compound this problem with the fact that some users will choose to bump their font size to 100 pixels tall so they can read it across the room, there's a point at which stylistically you can't scale the rest of the graphical information to accommodate. There are some standards, however and they usually push toward the center. The adaptation is going to find a tolerance outside of this probably based on the demand they have for it. If a monitor size is found to be the most flexible overall for a given project, this would be the default and would probably cover the widest gamut of viewers. There are extreme examples of where you might want to throw in exceptions, such as alternative styles for mobile devices. Large monitors might be somewhat harder to adapt for a few reasons. First, it would usually produce a similar effect as the smaller monitors without much change. Second, the aspect is going to be widely diverse at this point. It's hard to predict whether you want to alter the layout for an uber wide or uber long screen. Flexible columns could get a bit unwieldy. Users who work at these sizes usually have a wider diversion of font sizes they prefer to view at which would make the exceptions you plan for fork and do unpredictable communist things to the page. Now that monitors themselves are getting larger and larger, standards are likely to push the center up, there is only so much tolerance one will efficiently be able to plan for and still say what they want, how they wish to say it.
Some people don't like newspapers because of their ungainly mess. Most people fix this by folding and sorting the paper how they like. Maybe its time that we need browsers that can intelligently "fold" information in standard ways.
There are some cool ideas in here. I agree with Kerry: UI is hard to do and very very hard to get right. Worse, "right" is a moving target.
