Subject: And now for an example of a different style of website

From: Justin Clift <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 23:35:11 +0800

Let's think a little more "Out of the box" here:

http://www.actden.com

(We warned, this is a site that shows off technology like MS 
Office, etc)

But the point is, instead of getting stuck on the argument of the 
details, you guys (I'm not helping out here for the moment, so 
count me out) should look at the big picture again.

This site takes _a different approach_.  It's _end user oriented_ 
in a different way than what you've all been looking at.

Take the opportunity here to do something pretty nifty... just 
cause.  :)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

-- 
Executive Director
Digital Distribution Global Training Services Pty. Ltd.
Premier OpenOffice.org and StarOffice Online Training providers
http://www.digitaldistribution.com

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From: "Marc G. Fournier" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 12:52:51 -0400 (AST)

cute site ... and another 'fixed width one' ... just curious, but who is
all crying for 'variable width'?  I *really* like the consistency a fixed
width site provides, so that no matter what your browser, or screen
resolution, the site will still look the same ...

On Fri, 16 Jan 2004, Justin Clift wrote:

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Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: [email-masked]           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664

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From: Josh Berkus <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 11:25:54 -0800

Marc,

> resolution, the site will still look the same ...

The trick is that a fixed width site needs to be usable at 800x600 resolution, 
since this is the resolution of 40% of the monitors in American businesses, 
the last time anyone did stats on it (2000, I think).

-- 
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco

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From: "Marc G. Fournier" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 15:29:14 -0400 (AST)

> the last time anyone did stats on it (2000, I think).

Agreed ... that just means the width is fixed at the 800, that's all ...

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From: Robert Treat <[email-masked]>
Date: 16 Jan 2004 17:19:55 -0500

> Agreed ... that just means the width is fixed at the 800, that's all ...

<sigh> do we have to go over this again... different users have
different monitor sizes. People with big monitors want to be able to
resize their browsers to view multiple windows simultaneously. You can't
assume that everyone's window width is 800 pixels: it's too much for
some users and too little for others. It's not that difficult to make a
stretchy site that looks good at multiple widths, I think php.net is a
classic example of this (though debian, kde, mozilla, ximian are also
good examples). 

Robert Treat
-- 
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL

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From: "Marc G. Fournier" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 19:00:07 -0400 (AST)

> classic example of this (though debian, kde, mozilla, ximian are also

just looked at php.net, and you are correct, seems to resize nicely ...

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From: Robert Treat <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 19:33:13 -0500

> just looked at php.net, and you are correct, seems to resize nicely ...

mmm... sorry for the tone, guess it was a long week... just that in my former 
life I used to be the "user experience adviser" for the IT department of a 
fairly good-sized corporation I often went round and round over things like 
this with the developers, things that most of "us usability types" consider 
basic maxims.  Probably why I now work on the database side; everyone 
*thinks* they can do design, but people rarely look at a website and think 
"they should have used 3 tables and a view to handle that data" :-)

Robert Treat

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From: Josh Berkus <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 16:37:31 -0800

Robert,

> Probably why I now work on the database side; everyone 

You should meet some of my clients:

Exec: "I think we should unify everything on MySQL."
Me: "But MySQL won't support our reporting tools."
Exec: "Of course it will."
Me: "When did MySQL add support for UNION queries and custom functions?"
Exec: "I don't know.  I don't understand this database stuff.  That's what I 
have you for."
Me: sigh

Really .....

-- 
-Josh Berkus
 Aglio Database Solutions
 San Francisco

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From: "Marc G. Fournier" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 22:06:26 -0400 (AST)

> Exec: "I don't know.  I don't understand this database stuff.  That's what I

*rofl*  we should have an anecdotes section for stuff like this on our web
site ;)

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From: "Steve Simms" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2004 09:25:02 -0500 (EST)

> the last time anyone did stats on it (2000, I think).

CSS can provide for this with the concept of a max-width attribute (name might
be slightly off).  You can design a variable-width page that will work on
800x600, and have it expand on larger browsers, not to exceed a certain point,
so that you don't end up with paragraphs of text on a single line at
1600x1200.

The caveat is that I'm not sure how well browsers support this.  I know that
some do, and some don't, as always.  Depending on the distribution of support,
this might be enough to satisfy those that want fixed-width and those that
want variable-width.

Steve Simms
Database Developer & Administrator
Medical Media Systems, Inc.

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From: Peter Eisentraut <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2004 23:56:34 +0100

> in a different way than what you've all been looking at.

You guys got this all wrong.  This is the site we want to imitate:

http://www.ijg.org/

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From: "Marc G. Fournier" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2004 22:56:40 -0400 (AST)

would make the whole translation issue alot simpler :)

On Sat, 17 Jan 2004, Peter Eisentraut wrote:

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