scalable height

keeping pages from being too short

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• colors and uniformity
  • different resolutions
  • why small pages
  • scaling height

different resolutions

There are some new conflicting problems with keeping pages small and high resolution. Take a look At this the picture below. The show on the left is of the site at 640 resolution. The shot on the left is the same site at 1280.

we see at 640:	we see at 1280:

See the problem? The page looks full and balanced at 640. At 800 it's about the same. However, when we get to 1280 the site just gets too short. It fails to fill the entire browser window

why small pages

Remember that each page should be a small as possible. DSL, ISDN, fast networks are still the exception and not the rule. Small pages allow faster download. Regarding usability, smaller pages keep the viewer from getting lost. Smaller pages are useful as well when graphics are necessarily large. But here's an example of a page that has all the information on it that it needs, and, based on its look, is a bit sparse. Yet, this smart style is compromised at high resolutions.

scaling height

There is a solution that's less than perfect. We could use the HEIGHT=100% attribute for the formatting table. This does two things: It allows the table that controls the formatting of the page to flow from the top to the bottom of the page, eliminating the problem of the page of being too short for the browser window. But, this attribute creates a new problem. By scaling the page instead of fixing its height, we run the risk of making the page look too stretched at high resolutions

But is this really a problem? This page allows scalable fonts, and uses a fixed-width left and middle column with a flexible-width right column. This means that, on the horizontal, the user has control over the look of the page anyway. For each resolution, we simply have presented the page, for each font size chosen by the user, a new vertical look. We haven't added any new set of vertical looks, just replaced the more traditional table height with a scaled table height.