Adam Maas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Bandwidth is dirt cheap for commercial sites, and even cheaper for
> non-rural consumers. I can get multi-meg Ethernet for less than a
> T1 cost 4-5 years ago.
So why load sites down so much that it feels like I'm still on
dialup, eh? ;-) (More importantly: bandwidth is not the
ony resource consumed, and if I've got eighty tabs open in
my browser already, client-CPU-intensive pages slow down even
if I'm not also running GIMP and Mplayer on the same machine.)
But that's not my main point.
> It's not about stealing photo's, it's about ensuring that your
> site looks the way you designed it.
Bzzzt! You _can't_. Not reasonably. You don't know how big my
screen is, how much of it I've given to the browser, or what the
screen resolution is set to. (Worse, you don't know whether I
even have Flash installed in the browser I'm using today -- gee,
I see an awful lot of interesting-sounding links that lead me to
an all black page.) If my screen is a different size then yours,
then either I'll have to scroll horizontally to read anything
(one of the faster ways to get me to give up and go read something
else instead) or leave a big empty space around it.
HTML is designed to make such problems go away. The price? The
designer has to give up the "I Precisely Control Every Exact Detail
Absolutely" mindset and let the browser, and the user, make some
of those decisions.
PDF has its purpose, and Flash has its purpose, but there are
times -- and on the web, most times are those times -- when you
should let HTML do what HTML was designed to do.
And you _want_ to allow users, especially users with visual impairment
(okay, we're talking photography, which implies a certain level
of vision, but some of us need help with the fine print) who want
to be able to change the font size to read the content that all
the glitz is supposed to make them want to read. Or, for that
matter, to be able to replace a designer's oh so pretty and tasteful
colour combinations with ones where you can actually read the text
without getting a headache.
You don't want to a) make it harder for spiders to navigate the
site (usually), b) make it harder for people using different software
than you expected to navigate the site, c) make it harder for people
to adjust the look to be easier to read, d) make it difficult or
impossible for users to bookmark the pages they want or (a big
deal) send URLs of those pages to friends who may also be interested ...
Hey, a while back the big problem was sites that replaced all of the
perfectly good HTML navigation stuff with Javascript controls that
broke for blind users, security-conscious users, and anyone using
a text browser. Now it's Flash instead, which I'm given to understand
is less of a security issue but is still a problem on the other
counts. I don't think it's mostly about "making it look right
everywhere (even when the user is deparately trying to change it
so they can read it)" most of the time; I think it's about having
to out-glitz the last web designer to get the client's attention, or
marketing folks hung up on what would e pretty in a television
commercial.
-- Glenn
PS: Yes, I do still use a text browser. If I want to look
something up in a hurry, or instantly strip out accented letters
and asymmetrical quotation marks for ease of copy-and-paste, or
if I'm screen-scraping information to have some script parse,
I fire up trusty old Lynx. It's not what I use for surfing, but
like many other tools it has its uses. And it's annoying when
what should be a useful tool is thwarted for not-very-good reasons.
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