Binary Bonsai will no longer support 800×600. That’ll be fun when I’m browsing on my cellphone (or any other niche client) then…

I don’t know whether people’s attitudes are broken, or whether maybe the web is broken.

People use a wide variety of resolutions. I don’t personally know anyone using 640×480 or 800×600 on a personal computer, but I know lots of people (including me) who browse at even lower resolutions on mobile devices. Then there’s browser window sizes…

Screen resolution is NOT viewport size. My home and work machines both run at 1280×1024, but my browser windows are generally a little over 800px wide, and as tall as I can make them (to reduce the need for scrolling). I’d guess that makes the window somewhere in the region of 850×990. Subtract the chrome, and that leaves you with a viewable area of maybe 810×970 (I’m guessing, sue me).

99% of sites look acceptable in this setup, and I generally dismiss sites that aren’t readable in this format – unless the content is sufficiently compelling to make it worth my while reorganising my layout, but I’ll still grumble about it.

Yes, I’m a high-end user, and I know most people will run every single application maximised, wasting all that screen space and ensuring they can only see one application at once. Maybe they can only cope with one application at once, I don’t know (my xterms are all 80×24 chars too)…

The K2 theme (the current design of this site) almost fits into an 800×600 viewport – the margins/padding make it a little wider, so whilst the content will be entirely visible in 800×600, you’ll still get the sideways scrollbar cluttering up your browser window, and reducing the visible screensize. In 640×480, you can read the article text, but have to side-scroll to get the sidebar content.

Fluid width was supposed to solve all this, but in my opinion it’s even worse. I seem to recall that something like 60-80 characters per line is the ideal number for readable text, and with a fluid layout you still have to pick the viewport width for which you want your users to be able to easily read your content. A 1000px wide viewport might make for 70 characters per line, giving 800×600 users 60 characters per line and 1280×1024 users 80 characters per line – great. But people using 1600×1200 or wider are going to get 120 characters per line, and are going to struggle to read a thing – if we assume that most users keep their browsers maximised. Widescreen displays are something else again – 2560×1024 isn’t that uncommon, and 160 characters per line is asking a lot of your readers.

So if fixed width is bad, and fluid width is also bad, what are the options?

I’ve chosen fixed-width as the lesser of two evils – it’s readable without side-scrolling on most clients, and the default font size ensures a reasonable line length (although font size on screen differs wildly between OSs).

How about dynamic font sizing? You’d probably have to accompany it with dynamic image sizing for it to work properly, which is another problem altogether – resized bitmaps look awful. Vector images were supposed to solve this, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in the wild.

PDFs already work like this – the entire content shrinks and expands to fit your window size (with overrides available, of course), and it would be interesting to see whether a web that worked in the same way would be more accessible – or maybe less so.

Obviously it doesn’t work like that, although you could probably achieve something close with cunning use of JavaScript. Of course, 10% of clients don’t have JavaScript support activated, so it’s hardly a solution. Still, I think I might knock up a demo over the weekend, just to see whether it’s even possible…