What is Digg?Sponsored by Travelzoo
Take Advantage of Ridiculously Low Holiday Airfares view!
travelzoo.com - Flights $52 and up for Thanksgiving, Christmas & New Year. But move on it now.
107 Comments
- Bogtha, on 10/12/2007, -5/+46> So I'd like to see the 800x600 standard stay around on webpages a little longer
800x600 isn't a standard. There is no standard, it's as varied as page background colours.
The people designing for 800x600 need to stop. Right now. I'm fed up of visiting websites and having a big gap down the side doing nothing, while two or more columns are crammed into two-thirds of the page.
The people designing for 1024x768 need to stop. Right now. I'm fed up of visiting websites and being unable to read half the page because my browser sidebar happens to be open.
Web pages are not paper. You don't need to pick a size. HTML by default flows to fill the entire width of the window, no matter how big or small it is. That works great for virtually everybody, regardless of what resolution they are running or what window size they have. Stop screwing it up!
And for the one person who always brings it up, if you want to limit your line-lengths for extra-large windows, you can use max-width for <p> elements, set in units other than px. - pornel, on 10/12/2007, -6/+41and how many surfers use maximized window and want webpage to occupy their entire screen?
how pissed off is the minority forced to scroll horizontally 1024+ designs? - ThankTheCheese, on 10/12/2007, -2/+30agreed. widescreen displays aren't really designed for full-screen windows, Mine is 1680x1050 but I rarely have a browser window open more than ~1000 wide. Modern OSs are designed for multitasking and run most apps in a window -- Mac OS especially. Moreover, websites with relative widths that stretch to the available width of a window can look terrible when more than ~1200 wide.
even if tomorrow everyone has a 1600 wide screen, web designers should still optimise their sites for 1024x768 IMO. - nanabite, on 10/12/2007, -10/+32This comes as little suprise to me. I don't think 800x600 should be a major consideration anymore for sites targetted towards tech people especially. That said, at the same rate as resolutions are getting higher, they are getting lower too - people are beggining to display sites at resolutions of up to 640x480 on mobile devices now. Interesting times.
1680x1050 here btw. - positron, on 10/12/2007, -6/+27@Bogtha:
That's great and all, but when you actually design websites as a profession a funny thing happens. You have these people called clients, see. Clients are a funny sort of people. They tend to want things exactly the way they want them.
A large majority of these client people or companies come from a world without electronic media. Often there is no amount of explanation about 'liquid design' or talk of varying user screen resolution that can convince them that their site should not necessarily look exactly the same to everyone who visits it. These are an odd people who tend to put a great deal of worth on absolute control and that philosophy is unfortunately carried over into their ideas about their Web presence.
Now, when these people are the ones paying your bills, it's very impractical to argue too forcibly with them. When it's a choice between delivering pixel-perfect design or eating Ramen at three meals a day perhaps you might begin to think differently. Perhaps in future, when these client people's children (who will have grown up in a world of electronic media) take the reigns or when SVG-based design becomes a standard things will change. Until then my friend, keep the dream alive! - penguinix, on 10/12/2007, -6/+25I have a large resolution monitor and take advantage of that by running multiple 800x600 windows across my screen instead of running pages at fullscreen. By doing this I can run a webpage on one half and then keep an eye on my itunes or a video on the other half. So I'd like to see the 800x600 standard stay around on webpages a little longer even if most people are running higher resolutions now.
- david76, on 10/12/2007, -0/+18Just because you have available real estate doesn't mean you should use all of it. There is a comfortable width for reading paragraphs of text which is defined by the size of the font. Generally, 30 times the size of the font. So if your font is 1em your width for the block is 30em. (Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style)
So, having a larger canvas doesn't necessarily mean you should have a wider page of content. For many sites, like blogs, I imagine you wouldn't want to take up all of the real estate afforded by a 1024x768 screen. Portals, of course, are another story, because you're filling the real estate with functionality as opposed to rote content. - Unicron, on 10/12/2007, -3/+21Bit late to the party, but:
NO ONE CARES WHAT YOUR RESOLUTION IS
(I mean all the morons posting theirs, not the article) - Skeuomorph, on 10/12/2007, -2/+19Praise be to nanabite for reminding Diggers that designing for any resolution is bad design. Sure, we've got 23" or 30" widescreen displays, but we've also got an increasing number of Tablet PCs in portrait mode, which is 768 x 1280, narrower than 800. There's also a growing number of Slate PCs at 768 x 1024 (some are even 600 x 800), UMPCs, HTC Wizard family of WM5 handhelds, etc.
I've been hearing this resolution debate since the "can we go to 800x600 from 640x480?" days in the mid 90's. The answer remains proportional liquid designs or alternate stylesheets. - paradoxic, on 10/12/2007, -3/+17It depends on the size of your monitor. Resolution is only one aspect.
- teetow, on 10/12/2007, -3/+15Oh man... I wish you hadn't posted that. Now we're gonna see even more crappy pages designed on the faulty assumption that everyone browses in 1024x768 - full-screen. Sigh.
- bede, on 10/12/2007, -4/+16Isn't the idea to design a site so that it looks at reasonable at any resolution? Graceful degradation, that's the kiddie.
(having said that 1280 x 1024 here) - Lorian, on 10/12/2007, -4/+15I use 1280x960 here (my monitor doesn't support over 60Hz at 1280x1024, so I don't use it), and when at school, they used to have all the monitors set at 800x600. I did want to kill something, it was awful. What made it worse was they even did it on the LCDs which were 1024x768 native, and we all know how bad it looks using the non-navive res on an LCD.
Oh well, I've finished school now. Life is good. - analgesia, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12You want to ignore a 12% marketshare?!
If that is the case than don't bother making your site work on anything other that IE too. - daofma, on 10/12/2007, -6/+15I agree with you completely. 1024x768+ pages annoy me. I don't like overlapping windows when I can avoid it.
- matt0ne, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9My decision to design in 800x600 or less becomes more of a style choice than anything else. I don't feel the need to cram as much info into that space.
Also, interesting that there was absolutely no need to read the article - seems the synopsis summed it up pretty well. - chadu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6post your school name so everyone knows not to go there. your instructor sounds like a dumb *****. she probably uses image maps, too.
- Skeuomorph, on 10/12/2007, -5/+10@positron: Even when they pay your bills, it's your job as the expert to save them from themselves and gently persuade them to do the right thing. An ability to upgrade the client's (or boss's) expectations is a value add that will set you apart from the rest of the designer pack and increase your income.
- mbthompson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I'd have to agree about resizing being important. There's nothing more annoying than having to either scroll left or right to seen an entire webpage when I've already got my display at 1280x1024. Most of the garbage like that is on MySpace by users who don't have a clue but still, it illustrates the point of multi-res formatting. I would imagine the people that run 800x600 go through it all the time.
- rorrison, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5My screen (on this PC) is 1280x1024. Why do you care? My web browser window is somewhat smaller, depending on what else I'm doing at the time (I like overlapping windows so I can see what's going on in the other ones, and move them and resize them constantly). Designing a website for a particular pixel width or height is brain-dead.
- liquidjill, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6This is why dynamic resizing is so important. It has always amazed me how many high end high priced sites there are that don't re-size for ratio differences. It isn't really that hard to do in comparison with learning how to do embedded flash integration and the long list of other dev stuff that I don't understand.
I run at 1440 x 900 but I would not design with that in mind any sooner than I would the many, more typical ratios. We aren't talking about white castle fries here people. - xtr3m, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5The amount of times they mention their name in the press release hurts.
- smellinator, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Part of being successful in business is to do what the client or your boss wants. The purpose of many classes is often to prepare you for the real world. You ignored the specific design requirements of your client (or boss), and so failing is justified, as you described it.
Imagine going to a car dealer shopping for a sports car. You tell the sales person that you want a sports car, but all he wants to show you are trucks. First the low end. You say you don't like it. So he shows you one with even more features. "it has more power and room than any sport car, so this is what you want." He just keeps adding features and making it a "better" option for you, but ignores the fundamental requirement - the "sports car" requirement that you mentioned. You SHOULD fail him, and shop elsewhere! - curmudgeon7205, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6I hope 800x600 continues - - I no longer have the eyesight to be able to easily read a lot of 1024x768 content, especially where the designer insists on layering pastel fonts on top of while/light/pastel backgrounds (color blindness, as well)!
- rorrison, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4@kerplunk
"People who run their monitors at 1280x1024 are noobs."
Judging by your command of English, I've been using computers since before you were born, and I run my monitor at 1280x1024.
"It's no secret that this resolution is a 5:4 ratio."
Anyone with a calculator (or reasonable head for numbers) can figure that out. It couldn't possibly be a secret.
"Computer monitor manufacturers are idiots for making this resolution the native resolution. Especially since the actual physical monitor is in a 4:3 format."
And you know that ... how? Have you ever actually measured a monitor whose native resolution was 1280x1024? My Relisys is approximately 34cm x 27cm, which is pretty darn close to a 5:4 ratio (I'm inclined to belive that my measurements are a little bit off and it is exactly 5:4).
"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than open your mouth and remove all doubt." - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5oh wow another one of these lame 800x600 should die diggs..
well any company that stops being accessible to 15% of its users is insane.
use 800x600 on my tv/computer so i can see it from here.. and yes i have the old people theme going on too.
lenty of third world , poor, non tech people still use 800x600
I guess it really is up to the site creater, check out your visitors demographics and decide for your self if you can ignore 800x600
but otherwise this discussion s lame.. what is more newsworthy is 1280x1024 being #2 - neofactor, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5There is an entirely different side of things you need to consider....
Visual Integrity Sizing.
Some sites (I have many) are actually a fixed width for a consistent size that is not effected by how wide your screen res is set for. All users have a consistent layout regardless. This is critical in some visual medium.
The other aspect of this is Print Integrity Pages... meaning... WYSIWYG on screen and printer. Just because a webpage can stretch all content into a wide res... a printer is much much more limited even in landscape mode... which most people do not select when printing.
Before the CSS fanboys come running in and say you can have different CSS for web and print... that sucks for some sites... where a user wants to print the page and end up printing some "altered and reduced" CSS print version. They end up having to take screen shots which is a pain for people when all they want to do is print the page as is.
So... if you could care less about all of the above... or I should say... your audience could care less... then Full screen it. But visually... users who see a well formatted site in their 800x600 res monitor... users of 1024x or worse 1600x... they see one long line of text.
Just things to consider... if you are someone that actually gives a ***** for a living. - mynimal, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6@pornel: Yes, but 800 x 600 users are much more likely to maximize the browsing window in order to view a website. If you have space as limited as that would you waste it on sidebars and other gadgets? Not likely.
(I actually said this before, to a similar digg submission, and to the same user. For the record, I browse with my window maximized and I'm on 1600)
Also, I may be weird but I run 1600 x 1200 and I still browse with the window maximized. - monkeyninja, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I know many people who like to use browser toolbars on the side of the window too, reducing the available screen width for a page before you need to scroll horizontally. Some people also seem to think that you should make wide designs to fill the screen, even if it means the text stretches right across the window making it difficult to read. Basically people need to really think before they start putting together a web design.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Don't design for the majority of web users, design for your CLIENTS.
I'm designing a website for a financial company who's clients are 50-60+. Of course, most are computer illiterate and have their computer on 800x600 because we've yet to have resolution-independant fonts (is that the phrase)?
So of course, I design for 800x600, but make it look fine on 1024x768. - luke--, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I have a web designer friend who is really good at making dynamic width websites, it's amazing because whether 768 or 1200 pixels wide the site looks like it was made for that width exclusively.
- david76, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4For those of you who are interested in learning more about typography:
The Elements of Typographic Style, Robert Bringhurst
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0881792063/
This is THE book on typography. Granted, this book deals with print typography, but the same concepts apply anywhere typography is used. - Sheco, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6I have a wide screen laptop, my resolution is 1900x1200, but I use a firefox extension that makes the browser window 1024x768 and stretch it downwards.
- jprater, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3when i was finishing my degree this past year, i had to take a web design course. our instruct incisted our pages be no wider than 600px so we can accomodate everyone's computer. I don't know about you, but i don't know anybody who uses a 640x480 (or whatever it is) resolution. i made my site 800px wide and she failed me for it. she also was in love w/ frames and since i think frames are useless, i did not use them. another reason why i failed the project.
if i ever make a website, i will use width=90% or whatever so i can make everyone happy. - gamesector, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Why is this news? Everybody with an ounce of sense knew this already.
- Bogtha, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2> True, but paper works quite well, does it not?
Paper is operating under a completely different set of constraints. Paper doesn't have to worry about variable font sizes or screen widths.
Furthermore, it's silly to say that just because paper works quite well that it's a good idea to throw away improvements that aren't possible with paper. Do you think when the concept of the hyperlink was born, people stood around saying "yeah, but paper can't do that, and paper works quite well"?
> It's nice to be able to plan how the site will look, instead of hoping the person's browser isn't too big or too small,
Well yes, but I hope you realise that is a fantasy and not reality. If you have a fixed width design, it doesn't magically make the problem of variable width windows go away, you're just pretending it doesn't exist.
> I'd rather the site always look the same
That's impossible, and even if it weren't, variable renderings are a huge strength of the web. Even if you have a fixed-width design set in pixels, that is going to appear at different sizes depending on the resolution. - jasonwea, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3My primary workstation is a PowerBook G4 15" (1280x864) and my browser window is approximently 1024x768. My secondary web browsing machine is my Linux box hooked up to a 2 metre wide front projection display running 1280x720. On this display I have set the DPI so the font is quite large so I can read it easily across the room.
A lot of sites don't handle this very well with their fixed pixel layouts when I increase text side in Firefox. It's quite annoying.
Bad sites stand out immediately and I leave them. Both Slashdot and Digg work well here. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5"Web pages are not paper. You don't need to pick a size."
True, but paper works quite well, does it not? It's nice to be able to plan how the site will look, instead of hoping the person's browser isn't too big or too small, and stretches or squeezes everything together. I'd rather the site always look the same, with the only difference being how much white space sidebars they get. I also don't want some users to have to scroll to see the right side of the page, I have to do that with the computers at college. So 800x600 it is. - Bogtha, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3> That's great and all, but when you actually design websites as a profession...
...which I do...
> You have these people called clients, see. Clients are a funny sort of people. They tend to want things exactly the way they want them.
You certainly do have funny clients. See *my* clients come to me because they *aren't* web design experts. They leave decisions about design width up to me. If they bring it up, I explain the issues.
I've been a professional web developer for almost a decade now. In all that time, the number of *clients* who have insisted on a particular width is exceptionally small. Vanishingly small. In fact, I can't recall a single one, but I'm sure there have been some.
Does that mean I haven't coded fixed width layouts? Of course not. But the fixed-width constraint has either come from other designers or from managers. I used to curse the clients until I started talking to them myself and realised that they weren't actually the ones insisting on it and were quite happy to take my advice.
Your job as a professional designer is not to do whatever the client wants without complaint. If I did that, I'd end up with garish blinking neon websites that played music half the time. The clients are not expert web designers. If they were, they wouldn't need us, would they? Part of the job is to gently dissuade them from poor design decisions.
> Now, when these people are the ones paying your bills, it's very impractical to argue too forcibly with them.
Of course. But it's not my experience that this is necessary. Think about it - how are they even going to know that a design is fluid? In the vast majority of cases, they just load it up in their browser and don't play around with their window size. A fluid-width design would be indistinguishable from a fixed-width design targeted at their screen resolution, because by definition, it would automatically flow to the same width.
It's not my experience that fixed width design is a sticking point for clients. Font size, on the other hand, tends to be a problem more often than I'd like, partly because unlike fluid widths the font size is immediately visible. - SmeRndmGy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3They need to come up with a way for web pages to adapt to whatever resolution a person is using. I didn't get a 19 inch monitor to read a column of text 3 inches wide. It should be dynamic, so people running low resolution on a crappy old CRT can read it, and so it expands and takes advantage of all the screen space for people with more current screen resolutions.
- seanmac, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Remember like all design statistics (javascript on/off, flash version, browser version, etc.) you should always look at your OWN website statistics before assuming that your audience is an "average" audience. For example, on one of my sites, about 19% of my users have 800x600. I could not ignore 19% (although ignoring 12%, the figure in the article, is kind of stupid as well).
- MioTheGreat, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5It makes sense that 1280x1024 is rising. It is a pretty standard resolution for new 17" LCD monitors, which seem to be popular with Dell/HP/etc.
- kevincupp, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5I'd like the standard resolution for webpages to stay at 800x600. To me, that's all a webpage needs. My actual monitor is at 1280x1024, but I keep my browser at approx. 800 pixels wide. I just don't need web pages taking up more real estate on my desktop. I think 800 pixels is enough and should continue to be the standard web designers use.
- gio_pio, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Fortunately for us, Bringhurst has begun building "The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web" at http://www.webtypography.net/
He is an exceptional typographic resource. - ejp1082, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I run at 1280x1024, 1024x768, and 1280x780.
The whole debate seems stupid to me though - why not just use alternate stylesheets or else proportional designs? Site content should stretch out to whatever size my browser can display - and minimally should look right at 800, 1024, and 1280 pixels across. - 15charmaxwtf, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I wouldn't mind a screen that refreshes 75 million times a second.
- tychop, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Fixed sized sites are horrible.
Neither 800x600 or 1024x768 are goeed sized sites.
They should be dynamically resizable. Then you please everyone.
You can then resize your browser window to the width & height you like - jamelt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I've been using very high resolutions for a long time, and recently I can't take too much reading of small fonts, sometimes I'm forget it and crank it up to 1024x768 or 800x600 so I can just read with ease.
I can see the same people on here now babbling about make sites for 1280x1024 when they hit there late 50s yelling, make stuff more legible. - mbthompson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@rorrison
nice reference to Proverbs - veritech, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1All sites should be designed for 800*600 with a 1024 as an option(depending on how you do it.) or made to auto scale using the max width property which will be supported widely thanks to ie7.
btw 2560*1024 over here(19"x2) -
Show 51 - 100 of 110 discussions
The Digg Toolbar for Firefox lets you Digg, submit content, and keep track of Digg even when you're not on the Digg site. Download the official 
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is