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New cache pages look bad when running 800x600


Cache Liberation Front

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Oh great, a screenshot of one of Miragee's caches. She's gonna have a swelled head now. :(

 

Do people still use 800x600? :(

 

That's just one of Miragee's cache pages, all of hers look that way :ph34r:

 

 

Ok, on a more serious note, Raine needs to fix some things. :(

Edited by Team GPSaxophone
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I wonder how many people still surf at 800x600. At some point we have to draw a line! :(

 

-Raine

Quite a lot of people with less than 20/20 eyesight use this resolution. I long ago learned not to change the resolution on my older relatives PCs, because while I may think a higher resolution is better, they don't.

Edited by Prime Suspect
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Well with a name like Mr & Mrs Wisearse, you've gotta expect some humor in the replies :(

 

That said, the most popular size of monitor for several years now is 17" running at 1024x768 (or higher). If you need a larger font, you should get a larger monitor. Those old 14/15" monitors of the 20th century just don't cut it these days. Especially not at 640x480 or 800x600.

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The new cache page offers no help to the new cacher or those that still print out the page. The map is split in half when printing a page without logs.

Also, and I would say this is indeed important to many. When one prints out the cache page, the GC number does not show up. This will make it harder for those that are not paperless to log their finds. It says to print the cache friendly page, well thats not helping them. Unfriendly is what it is. You want the new cacher to have an easier time logging their finds not to make it more difficult!!

 

One once said, if it's not broken don't fix it!!!

Maybe we should remember those words!!

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It's not about the screen resolution but about best practices to keep pages rendable with variable page widths.

I do not have my browser in full screen mode because you will hide other windows. Usually I have one shell and one browser window open at all times. I keep mine at aroud 800px wide.

Yes there is a limit how small you can go and that is somethig to keep in mind. But pages should not be made for a specific window size. They might be made for a minimum window size and that has long been 640px wide, though it seems that the move is towards 800px wide.

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Just a bit of info....

 

My web server keeps track of visitors' screen resolution settings. About 3 years ago 45% were still set at 800x600 or less.

 

A quick check of the past 2 months shows that only 8% of visitors still have 800x600 or less. Only one was still at 640x480.

 

A full 35% are using resolutions greater than 1024x768. 4% as high as 1900 x 1200.

 

While I agree that you should design web pages to be somewhat flexible for resizing, you still have to design to some common minimum. Some simple changes should be made to allow those with 800x600 to at least "scroll" over rather than see a jumbled mess.

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I wonder how many people still surf at 800x600. At some point we have to draw a line! ;)

 

-Raine

 

Until a week ago, I was one of those people. I have a very hard time with the smaller type size on some of the other resolutions. Sorry, but with presbyopia, trifocals, and very poor uncorrected eyesight I needed that higher resolution to reduce eyestrain. (Don't worry... it does correct down just fine... but reading is still a bit of a headache.)

 

A week ago, however, hubby got me a new monitor... 19" HDTV. Even so, sometimes the smaller type has blurry edges.

 

As far as drawing a line... are you wanting to eliminate a large population from easily using your website?

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LCD monitors have only one "natural" resolution, corresponding to the number of transistors (divided by 3, for the three colours). Trying to reduce that makes the display fuzzy because every 4th or 5th pixel has to be doubled.

 

And, as you go from 15 to 17 to 19 inches, the number of pixels typically increases faster than the diagonal size. Result: characters and images on a 19-inch LCD screen are typically 10-15% smaller than those on a 15-inch.

 

So, if you have less than perfect vision and don't need massive width, the smaller screen can be the best proposition.

 

Alternatively, a good old-fashioned CRT can give a wide range of resolutions with very good sharpness. For some of my ocularly-challenged users at work, we still sometimes buy 20-inch CRTs and run them at 800x600.

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Are people still living in the stone age? have you heard that nowadays we have computers that are capable of running more than one application simultaneously.

 

I have 1600x1200 screen, but my web browsers are 750 pixels wide. Any wider and I'd have to go back to the eighties and use just one application at a time. Any wider and plain text would be hard to read because the lines would be so long that jumping from the end of one line to the beginning of the next would be difficult. A proper size and shape for a web browser is like a sheet of paper in portrait orientation. A big enough computer screen can display two such "sheets" side by side. For example the cache description in a web browser and whatever application I need while solving the mystery.

 

It is the sign of very bad web design if a site enforces one to use so wide a window that using properly designed web sites becomes difficult.

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I use a 20" LCD (1280x1024) at work and a 19" widescreen at home. I tried a quick experiment here at work and viewed a few webpages at 800x600. They were all terrible! 800x600 just is not suited for browsing the Internet.

 

Here's an example of a cache page at 800x600: (really not that bad)

 

800x600.jpg

 

 

Here's the same page at 1024x768: (I don't see much difference in the layout except the menu on the right)

 

1024x768.jpg

 

Both images were reduced by 20% so those at low resolutions can see them. The image quality is reduced because the images were converted to JPG format to save on bandwidth.

 

So, what's the problem, besides the squeezed look that is a natural byproduct of low resolution? There's just less wasted whitespace at 800 than there is at 1024.

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I wonder how many people still surf at 800x600. At some point we have to draw a line! :D

 

-Raine

Quite a lot of people with less than 20/20 eyesight use this resolution. I long ago learned not to change the resolution on my older relatives PCs, because while I may think a higher resolution is better, they don't.

 

According to the W3C (that's the folks that strive to set standards for the web) as of Jan 2007:

 

Unknown: 6%

640x480: 0%

800x600: 14%

1024x768: 54%

Higher: 26%

 

That's over 75% using wider that 600x800! As a professional Web Developer, you've got to design with the current standards in mind. I know that the standard in our shop is to design for a wider screen that will degrade gracefully to 800x600. It won't be perfect, but you won't have to scroll sideways either.

 

DCC

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Are those statistics based on the available screen size or the actual browser window size. I personally don't care if they are screen size based as it doesn't tell the truth of what size browsers people use. I would be quite amazed if people use full screen sized browsers on 1600 wide screen.

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A lot of people lower the resolution on their display to try make the characters larger and easier to read but this is actually the wrong thing to do. You always want to run your LCD at the native resolution of the panel and then adjust the system font size to make the text larger. :o

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Are those statistics based on the available screen size or the actual browser window size. I personally don't care if they are screen size based as it doesn't tell the truth of what size browsers people use. I would be quite amazed if people use full screen sized browsers on 1600 wide screen.

 

They are based on monitor resolution. There is no reason to gather info on how wide one chooses to open a window as that is an option left up to the individual. Using a browser at 1600 wide would be an interesting choice. If it was a site I was designing it would be "nailed down" so as not to expand past a certain point. When a page is too wide it makes it difficult for the human eye to transfer from the end of one line to the beginning of the next smoothly.

 

DCC

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I wonder how many people still surf at 800x600. At some point we have to draw a line! :blink:

 

The line to be drawn is at well-written markup/css that is not dependant on particular resolutions. Well-crafted markup degrades elegantly, even for folks on non-visual displays.

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A lot of people lower the resolution on their display to try make the characters larger and easier to read but this is actually the wrong thing to do. You always want to run your LCD at the native resolution of the panel ...
I use CRTs, so lowering the resolution works well for me.
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I have to say that the cache pages i've checked out lately are looking better on my 800x600 monitor. The big blank white spot near the top is gone and the fonts are readable and don't merge into other items on the page. Not positive but are the coordinates themselves larger? Seems like they stand out better now.

 

My only other request would be to see the lower map zoomed out a little so that it's easier to tell the general area that the cache is in. Matter of fact, it wouldn't hurt my feelings one bit to see the old style come back as they were about right to my notion. Thanks for the hard work!

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I wonder how many people still surf at 800x600. At some point we have to draw a line! :P

 

The line to be drawn is at well-written markup/css that is not dependant on particular resolutions. Well-crafted markup degrades elegantly, even for folks on non-visual displays.

 

All very true (especially when it comes to accessibility). But visual design has to be laid out for a minimum screen width, and it seems the Geocaching.com site (at least the homepage) is laid out for about 775px (before they begin to scroll sideways).

 

DCC

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I wonder how many people still surf at 800x600. At some point we have to draw a line! :lol:

 

-Raine

Seems simple enought to make the boxed area variable to shrink or expand depending on the width of display by using a percentage.

Until it starts squeezing the controls contained in the box and making that look like garbage.

 

When controls are added to a page to do more things that most folks want, you have to start taking page size limitations into consideration. 800x600 used to be a guideline to keep web pages at; not for eye sight reasons, but for reasons of laptop limitations. Those limitations are gone now, and have been for a few years.

 

I have found the more real estate I have on my desktop, the more space folks want to design their web sites for. I recently had to start designing our company web site for 1024x768 and even then, this is too narrow for all the info and controls my boss wants on it.

 

For you folks that use 800x600 for sight reasons, there are two methods to handle this after increasing your desktop resolution:

 

One is to increase your font size in the browser; usually located under the View menu. You can also increase your zoom level on most popular browsers now to make it easier to read.

 

For increasing the font size on the desktop, go to the Appearance section of your Display properties and increase your font size there. You can also choose to use larger icons and now you can feel better about going to a larger screen resolution.

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I wonder how many people still surf at 800x600. At some point we have to draw a line! :blink:

 

-Raine

 

I actually still use 800x600 at work (mainly because we haven't invested in bigger monitors :rolleyes: and some of the folks with less-than-perfect eyesight like it). But I don't have any problems with the site, in fact I'm viewing it from there right now. At home I only went to 1024x768 a few months ago when my 14" monitor died and bought a 17" one.

Edited by HaLiJuSaPa
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