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The ideal viewport doesn't exist

viewports.fyi

161–170 of 202 posts

Re: The ideal viewport doesn't exist

#161
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your company cares one iota about accessibility, you can usually get those features off the table instantly just by arguing that point. "Yeah, well it's pretty clear that competitor doesn't care about blind people" is a pretty easy argument. I invite you to learn to use a screen reader and try using your app (whatever it happens to be). It's seriously pretty terrible for some of these websites with all the fancy c…

I envy you cause the teams and companies that I've worked with basically say fuck em to that argument. I have lost jobs and annoyed people trying to argue for greater care with accessibility. It's somewhat depressing.

Another comment suggested you try to appeal to empathy. It might work, it might not.

If it doesn't you can instead appeal to the bottom line. Tell 'em that they might get targeted by an accessibility troll: https://www.wrightlawgroup.com/blog/attack-of-the-ada-trolls

As far as trolls go, I consider these fairly benign, as their behavior actually promotes something good; we got hit with such a lawsuit, and all of a sudden a11y became a big thing as our CEO didn't want to give a dime to those 'greedy assholes'.

Re: The ideal viewport doesn't exist

#162
post #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…

That's a fine (and arguably superior) philosophy for a simple personal site.

But it just isn't practical for a commercial product that needs manual testing. If you have a single breakpoint, you only have 2 versions to test. If you ultimately have 30 different breakpoint values, that's 31 versions to test. And that's a lot of opportunity for CSS rules designed in isolation to wind up colliding with undesired results.

Not to mention a nightmare for any designer to attempt to document expected behavior.

Re: The ideal viewport doesn't exist

#163

> "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…

There's one thing I absolutely will disable and that is the MFing pull to refresh. I hate that feature more than pretty much anything else about the Internet. Users can't, for some hideous reasons that should be illegal due to accessibility concerns, disable it, and it is an excellent way to accidentally throw away your work several times a month if you don't have very steady hands, depending on if the back button de…

If a website allows you to throw away a lot of work by accidentally refreshing the page, it's poorly written. There are multiple ways to deal with this: a warning, a confirmation prompt, storing data in sessionStorage, etc.

Re: The ideal viewport doesn't exist

#164

My favorite viewpoint anecdote: Many sites like to assume (like the article mentions) that a good 'mobile view' cut point is 768px. And some of those sites, in particular NodeBB (back when I used it), use the particular media queries `max-width: 767px` and `min-width: 768px`. On the right laptop, on the right version of everything, if you drag the title bar to one side of the screen so it resizes to fit half the scre…

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Re: The ideal viewport doesn't exist

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd think that eventually we'd have a large enough cohort of folks that know web dev well since the barrier is so low, but I think most people try to get out of frontend development asap.

I'm trying to learn some JS in my spare time, if only to show in interviews that I can do it, but I understand why one wouldn't want to. I'm just doing bare JS for now, but even with a framework, there is so much to manage in the DOM to make consistent interfaces, and CSS3 is so much more complex (but also convenient, in some ways!), putting together good interfaces is legitimately hard. Responsiveness is the big hur…

Web dev frontend has a thousand quirks but has a billion more hours of human hours development time spent on it. CSS is annoying but way better than trying to jiggle random attributes and subclassing stock components to do something basic like right align a label.

You'll notice that a lot of GUI toolkits have already adopted something like CSS (Qt Style Sheets, JavaFX CSS, etc.). Yet they will never become as good, just because there are much fewer people working on it.

Re: The ideal viewport doesn't exist

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd think that eventually we'd have a large enough cohort of folks that know web dev well since the barrier is so low, but I think most people try to get out of frontend development asap.

I dunno, I love it, quirks and all. The ability to make and deploy new UIs quickly is unmatched elsewhere. I also may be weird in that JS/TS is my favourite programming language.

I'm in the same camp, I'm always 10x more proud of my frontend work if for no other reason than it's closer to the users. Once you learn a framework and build up a few tools, you can move insanely quickly.

Re: The ideal viewport doesn't exist

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And disabling zooming? WHO EVEN DECIDED THAT WEBSITES SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO DO THIS?! Applications such as maps, image editors, presentations, and flowcharts benefit from having control over zoom. (And you'll notice that almost every one of them does.) This of course is only one difference of many between "documents" and "applications" and the web is being used for both.

No, they benefit from overriding the pinch gesture or the scroll wheel. Browser zoom shouldn't need to be a casualty for those features to work, it ought to stay available in some form.

Yes, that's what people mean.

Browser zoom cannot be overridden.

Re: The ideal viewport doesn't exist

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to see your maps app that doesn't touch zoom.

No offense, I had to try that.. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/LARGE_el... Look how fast and responsive it is!

I'll use it on my drive home.

Re: The ideal viewport doesn't exist

#169

> "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…

Using the data provided, I calculated the minimum window size in order to have full viewability among a percentile subset of the audience. Here are the answers: Mobile: 50% of viewports: Width 375, Height 635 80%: Width 375, Height 635 90%: Width 360, Height 560 95%: Width 360, Height 550 99%: Width 320, Height 500 Desktop: 50% of viewports: Width 1440, Height 900 80%: Width 1024, Height 600 90%: Width 1024, Height 6…

I've been using a min width of 320px lately due to some unusual displays, mainly on vertical flip phones with super-tall screens. That justifies my insanity. Thank you.

Re: The ideal viewport doesn't exist

#170
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Screenshots: https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmUL69cYwCs2sWV7eHqtt14BEcn...

Those are great examples, thank you for spending the time to make them.
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