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The ideal viewport doesn't exist

viewports.fyi

31–40 of 202 posts

Re: The ideal viewport doesn't exist

#31
post #5

I wish more pages took the pointer and resolution media queries into account. So many times I open windows side-by-side on my desktop and end up with the menu collapsing into a hamburger menu which fills the entire screen when clicked. Many phones today have very high DPI and very low precision in touch, so it makes sense to have massive visual elements and buttons, but my desktop with the same size in pixels as my p…

This is an interesting observation. Do you have some examples of this?

> Do you have some examples of this?

Sorry if it sounds rude, but have you used the web on the desktop in the past 10 years? Anything under 1000px-wide windows and sometimes 1200px-wide ones gets you the “mobile menu” on most websites. It’s a consequence of Bootstrap and other fixed-breakpoint frameworks. Overflow menus like what you see on GitHub repositories are the minority.

Re: The ideal viewport doesn't exist

#32
post #2

> It’s safest to presume that users on desktop or laptop devices are not filling their entire screen with a browser. Not on literally any laptop I've ever seen. I've never seen a screen where the browser _isn't_ filling all space available to them, sometimes even the entire screen (in fullscreen mode on MacOS).

You've never seen a 17"+ laptop I guess?

[flagged]

Re: The ideal viewport doesn't exist

#34

> "The main point we’re trying to get across is that you simply do not know how users are going to visit your website or web app. Instead of making design decisions on strict, limited breakpoints, keep in mind the sheer amount of fragmentation there is in viewports." I don't know how useful this is. setting breakpoints allows some sanity in the build and testing process otherwise you have an infinite scope for issues…

> I don't know how useful this is.

I think very. I've never designed anything based on arbitrary breakpoints (md, lg, xl and whatever numbers they might translate to) because that forces me to make design choices around those constraints.

The only way to sanely add breakpoints in my opinion is to gradually reduce the width of your page and search for things that start looking off. Are your paragraphs starting to look a little cramped? Add a breakpoint at that width, maybe remove the sidebar, maybe lower paddings and margins to allow it to stay a little longer, maybe manually reduce font size or switch your column layout to rows if applicable. Keep doing that until you get to ~350px width and everything looks fine. You decide what needs to change when it makes sense rather than being told that something needs to change at some specific breakpoint.

Re: The ideal viewport doesn't exist

#38

Landscape on mobile is the least well supported configuration I know. Static headers/footers commonly take 50% or more vertical space with no way to dismiss or shrink them.

> no way to dismiss or shrink them

You can shrink them by rotating your phone back to the correct, portrait orientation.

Re: The ideal viewport doesn't exist

#39
post #5

I wish more pages took the pointer and resolution media queries into account. So many times I open windows side-by-side on my desktop and end up with the menu collapsing into a hamburger menu which fills the entire screen when clicked. Many phones today have very high DPI and very low precision in touch, so it makes sense to have massive visual elements and buttons, but my desktop with the same size in pixels as my p…

This. Unfortunately today, the desktop is an afterthought and everything is designed for “mobile first”. I even see this in SaaS apps that should actually never be used on a phone. Or desktop OSes like windows and mac are increasingly using mobile paradigms on the desktop.

There is so much whitespace, huge fonts, huge buttons, hamburger popup menu everywhere (aaaargh!!)

Basically it boils down to the “information density” which is dumbed down to the lowest possible denominator.

There should be a measure for this and websites/apps should be rates based on that.

Re: The ideal viewport doesn't exist

#40
post #5

I wish more pages took the pointer and resolution media queries into account. So many times I open windows side-by-side on my desktop and end up with the menu collapsing into a hamburger menu which fills the entire screen when clicked. Many phones today have very high DPI and very low precision in touch, so it makes sense to have massive visual elements and buttons, but my desktop with the same size in pixels as my p…

I know the official line is that "media types have proven insufficient as a way of discriminating between devices with different styling needs." But as far as I can tell most people really do just want to know if the visitor is viewing on a monitor or a phone. Trying to back that out through media features like viewport resolution and pointer types has been a big mess. I don't think the plan to replace media types with media features is wrong, but so far we haven't been given the right features to do what we want.
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