k wrote:
Acidus wrote:
Agreed, though I'm not convinced that issue is 100% the fault of the page author. I don't think the tools available really are sufficient. [SNIP]
I'm sympathetic to your argument that a site should be able to handle all of those situations dynamically. Maybe I'm not smart enough, and I'm certainly not a web genius, but I really don't believe it's pure laziness that this doesn't happen. If it was trivial, someone would be doing it.
I've only got a vague notion of how I'd do it, because it's not just a matter of jacking text up and widening the box that text is in. You actually have to add a fair bit of logic to the page, detailing how to handle various situations.
I dunno, maybe I'm over (under?) thinking this or something.
Its not uber hard. Most people are using preexisting templates. Solve these problems in Blogger, Wordpress, MovableType, and you solve a large part of it.
I wrote some client side code for the upcoming upgrade to Memestreams that will allow pictures in posts. It using JavaScript t o dynamically resize an image to fit in a certain dimensions while preserving the aspect ratio. I should look at writing some JavaScript to dynamically so-called "hard" styles directives like width and wrapping based on client side user conditions like screen size, etc. This way, you don't need to be a HTML ninja.
[ It's a conversation I'm interested to have, because I'm with you... I think things should be better.
Fundamentally, it's not just an issue of allowing things to resize without breaking the layout... it's an issue of *changing* the layout to better fit the current window size/resolution/font size parameters. It's not about designing a structure, but designing a series of structures, defining the usage modes for each and writing the logic to transform from one to another. With JS and CSS I don't even think this is "hard" in the sense of requiring excessive skill, but it's hugely time consuming and ultimately falls victim to cost/benefit analysis.
Sometimes it seems like you're mostly talking about using relative sizing, though I know you're thinking much deeper than that. Still, to touch on that topic, I've had *very* mixed results using percentages for my DIV's and so forth. This gets back to the issue of not knowing how the UA is going to treat your code. I had situations where I'd resize the window and my content area being specified to wrap, and dynamically sized as a percentage, somehow text would get lost under the scrollbar. As if the width of the scrollbar wasn't being accounted for properly. The problem didn't happen when the box was fixed width. This is, of course, nothing I could really control... the browser was broken. Those sorts of bugs do get fixed, but in the short term, it made me abandon percentage based layouts.
Having designed internal sites for the government, I've had to learn all kinds of accessibility guidelines in order to comply with section 508 regulations. That kind of thing is good, no question, but in my experience, the result is a less rich interface, because the alternative is just too expensive in terms of developer time. It may be possible to offload some of the effort into a code framework, but the multiple page designs still need to be handled by humans. -k]
