Is it time to move beyond 960 pixels? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is it time to move beyond 960 pixels?

#11

Post by sachmanb » Fri, Apr 24, 2009, 12:11 AM UTC

wmf wrote: post #6

Ugh, no. This penalizes people with larger screens. 1920x1200 = two windows of 960px 2560x1600 = three windows of ~850px

everything sounded good about moving past 960 until i saw your comment and synthesized it with the knowledge that i do this very frequently.

the other problem with this and fluid designs on wide screens is that it becomes difficult to read text when it is that wide.

the best idea that i have seen is a site (or maybe it was sites, i know I've seen at least one), where the content is 960px but then if your browser window is wider, javascript adds additional content to the right of the content, columns that come down with additional links and further navigation options.

Re: Is it time to move beyond 960 pixels?

#12

Post by alexk7 » Fri, Apr 24, 2009, 12:14 AM UTC

Let's just let the web designers continue to use 960 and implement browsers with full page zoom that considers 1024 pixels as a relative page width for the whole window, no matter its true width. I think that's what iPhone Safari already does.

To accomodate people with bigger windows, link to bigger images so that they scale as beautifully as text.

Re: Is it time to move beyond 960 pixels?

#13

Post by scorxn » Fri, Apr 24, 2009, 12:16 AM UTC

abstractbill wrote: post #3

I remember being amused in 1996, that some newbie web developers were writing their html to work best with a specific number of pixels of width... I don't find it so funny these days.

The basic problem is that traditional designers are still trained to think in terms of canvases or formats, which have a fixed width and height. Moving beyond a fixed height is a cognitive hurdle. Moving beyond a fixed width is only more so, especially when bitmaps are involved.

Re: Is it time to move beyond 960 pixels?

#14

Post by pasbesoin » Fri, Apr 24, 2009, 12:18 AM UTC

tesseract wrote: post #10

Despite my laptop's display having 1440 horizontal pixels, I usually keep my web browser window around 900 pixels wide. I'd like it to be even narrower than that, but too many designers seem to assume it's a full 1024 and make their sites around 960 pixels wide. :) I do this for two reasons. One is that the remaining space on my screen is for other stuff. The other is that a lot of websites ignore the traditional typ…

I use Firefox with the Web Developer extension. In the latter, I have a few different Window sizes pre-defined. Changing to the desired Window size in only a drop and click away.

Re: Is it time to move beyond 960 pixels?

#15

Post by buugs » Fri, Apr 24, 2009, 12:20 AM UTC

bkbleikamp wrote: post #7

buugs wrote: post #4

What is the point of limiting website width to specific pixels, especially why go over so much thought for something from 960 -> 1020 or something small like that? You'd think with the netbook and mobile browser shrinking that the designers would stick to their guns.

960->1020 isn't necessarily that small depending on what the space is used for. If it's just making a content column wider then it's not really that useful in most cases, but if it's adding another column with useful information for the user, then it is a big deal - it makes the website that much easier to use.

Here is something 80 px wide http://www.novavision.com/clinic_images/Neurol%20Inst%20Colu...

to give you an idea of what kind of value can be added

Sure adding another column could be useful but as you can see by the authors tone he is talking about flow and divisions of columns and how those go well together and in all reality it sure doesn't make a hell of a difference even if you shrink something to add an extra column. After a while you get cluttered and usability/simplicity goes out the window.

Re: Is it time to move beyond 960 pixels?

#16

Post by DanielStraight » Fri, Apr 24, 2009, 3:44 AM UTC

What we really need is a way for users to apply their own width limits and have all designs be fluid.

In fact, I wonder why this isn't a common option in browsers.

What if your text editor didn't let you resize the window because it thought 80 characters was wide enough for anyone (80 characters at 10pt Courier, of course)? I would be pretty mad. Users should be in control of these sort of things.