On Feb 24, 2005, at 3:28 PM, Shel Belinkoff wrote:
I disagree. Most common size, as I understand it, is 1024w X 768h ... and
one must allow room for browser borders and other such peripheral things.
According to Dreamweaver (popular HTML editor) the design-size of a maximised browser on a 1024x768 desktop is 955x600 pixels. Of course, hitting F11 in IE puts it into Fullscreen mode which gets a little more space.
The above doesn't really apply to the Mac platform: we'd end up with less space than that due to the menu bar at the top and the Dock (which can be any size) at the bottom or at one side, depending on where it was placed by the individual user. Mac users don't have a maximise button anyway: hitting the green circle resizes the window by just enough to fully enclose its contents (this can actually result in a window shrinking - and yes, this is useful).
Having said all that, IE can be set up to automatically resize large pictures to fit on the screen. I think that option is enabled by default.
Keeping height to no more than 650, even less depending on how the image is
presented, is really a good way to go, IMO.
I'm nearly finished with my new photo database (I have the first 90% done, just need to do the next 90% then another 90% after that). For this site I've been designing with the following image sizes:
1) Landscape format images are 500 pixels wide (results in a height of about 300-400px depending on the aspect ratio)
2) Portrait format images are 400px high
3) Panoramas are 600px wide (results in about 200px height)
4) Vertical panoramas..... I haven't really thought about :)
5) All the thumbnails are 100px high. Panoramas cause a real problem in the thumbnail tables so I decided to do them as a separate gallery.
This represents a tradeoff between being able to see the whole pic on a small desktop vs the picture not being too small on a large desktop. Note that I do not specifically design for maximised browsers. My current PAW site (which hasn't been updated for a month now) uses slightly larger pictures than above, but that was designed for a different audience (yeah, you lot).
Actually here's a comparison between a page from the new gallery (I just uploaded the latest code):
http://www.bluemoon.net.nz/photo/printsdb/view.php?print_id=9
...and the same pic as presented on my current PAW site. The page design isn't hugely different except for the size of the pic (I hope they both work in your browser).
http://www.digistar.com/~dmann/cgi-bin/paw.cgi?date=2-Oct-2004
The new site doesn't look so great using a maximised browser at high-res but it's OK at 1024x768. I do plan to fiddle a bit more with the layout and the colours.
FWIW the old site is based on a custom CGI program I wrote in C a couple of years ago. The new one is based on PHP with a MySQL database behind it which allows me much more behind-the-scenes flexibility. I've included support for a separate PAW mode in the new system, where I can choose a photo from the main database to be displayed as a PAW with slightly different page formatting (this also encourages me to add more photos to the database!).
Cheers,
- Dave
http://www.digistar.com/~dmann/
