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Geek Culture / Annoying Website Sizes

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JoelJ
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Posted: 26th Mar 2010 05:04 Edited at: 26th Mar 2010 05:06
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I *LOVE* the feature of Windows 7 that lets you half-maximize a window (Aero-Snap) which allows you to have an application fill the left or right sides of the screen. I use this for almost EVERYTHING. I never ever maximize anything anymore. I would venture to say that having the web browser half-maximized (or of an equivalent width) is a pretty common thing now.
Anyway, I have scripts for both Mac and Ubuntu that let me half-maximize my windows. So my browser always takes up half the screen. Both my desktop monitor and my laptop monitor have 1920px width, which is pretty large.

[rant]

I have noticed that many, if not most, sites I visit lately, not excluding TGC forums (when you view a thread), assume that my browser is going to be WIDER than I always have it. So the right hand side of so many pages gets cropped off and I get the annoying horizontal scrollbar so I can scroll the 1/4 - 1/2 inch of missing web page. Really annoying. I just don't understand why web designers can't just write their pages well enough that this isn't a problem. if I have the problem so often with my high resolution, how much more often do people get it with a smaller res?

Gah, it's been driving me crazy. So Jeku (or whomever is working on the forums now), you should fix that so I can get at least some of my sanity back.

[/rant]

Edit: I just noticed it that it's the in-post flash Google Ads that push the size over... still, that can be fixed.

Your mother has been erased by a mod because it's larger than 600x120
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Phaelax
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Joined: 16th Apr 2003
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Posted: 26th Mar 2010 06:27
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Not sure what you're talking about. My laptop support 1440 width and this forum fits within a fraction of that space very easily and there's no horizontal scrollbar until the width shrinks below 700px or so. You sure you don't have your webpages zoomed in larger than normal?


"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" ~ Arthur C. Clarke
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Herakles
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Joined: 6th Mar 2009
Location: Lost in my own head
Posted: 26th Mar 2010 06:54
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I've had Windows 7 for a while now. I often forget the feature you're talking about even exists, and I certainly never use it. So it's not that big a deal for me.

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BearCDP
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Posted: 26th Mar 2010 06:58
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That "A Price Worth Celebrating" ad for Time Warner cable is the culprit for the wideness of this particular thread, I see what you're talking about. I don't have 7, but when I've used it on my friend's PC (and his sexy 24" monitor), we always half maximize: IDE on the left, PDF or browser on the right with documentation. I love that feature.

Check out this WIP flash game from the Global Game Jam!
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JoelJ
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Posted: 27th Mar 2010 02:37
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right now it's the Full Sail University ad. Whenever a thread has an ad I have this problem.

And my webpage size/zoom settings are all default.

Your mother has been erased by a mod because it's larger than 600x120
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Yodaman Jer
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Posted: 27th Mar 2010 02:43
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Installing an AdBlock plugin would keep most ads at bay, so the page wouldn't stretch anymore.


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Phaelax
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Posted: 31st Mar 2010 02:16
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half maximize? Don't really understand this "feature". Is it so hard to just resize the window to half the screen size.


"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" ~ Arthur C. Clarke
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BearCDP
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Posted: 31st Mar 2010 02:34
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It actually ends up saving a lot of time, and it's pixel perfect. No wasted screen space at all.

Check out this WIP flash game from the Global Game Jam!
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MSon
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Location: Earth, (I Think).
Posted: 31st Mar 2010 02:40 Edited at: 31st Mar 2010 02:46
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i've seen that feature advertised on TV, Microsoft made a big fuss about how great it was that windows 7 could do this, but if you ask me, its a waist of time, do you read 2 web sites at the same time? just use keyboard shortcuts to switch full screens, it fixes your problem as you have the full screen, and its quicker than messing around with the mouse, i rarely use a mouse, except for games and odd bits, and its quicker this way.

I don't know as i've not used windows 7, but i assume they cant advertise things like speed or reliability in there ad's, or they would.

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bitJericho
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Posted: 31st Mar 2010 03:47
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It's handy sometimes. What would be better is a way to do 3/4 to 1/4 split, that would be sweet. But uh, yeah, it's not a feature I use often. But it's handy when I need it. I guess that's what polish is

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RUCCUS
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Posted: 31st Mar 2010 03:49
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Its no secret that webpages should be designed to fit all resolutions and window sizes. But its also no secret that this has plagued web designers forever.

Have you ever tried doing it? You end up with three choices, each with their own downfalls:

1. Make your webpage small enough to fit in the lowest average resolution possible, generally being 800x600. The issue is obvious... it will be really tiny on any relatively high-end computers with bigger resolutions. This also doesnt solve window resizing.

2. Make multiple versions of your website to fit each resolution, and then get the viewer's resolution at load time using some basic javascript, and redirect accordingly. The biggest issue here is the need for designers to make multiple versions of a single webpage, which means tonnes of extra work. Its generally not worth it. Again, this doesnt solve the window resizing issue either.

3. Using tables or some other method, make your webpage resolution independant by having certain areas squash and stretch, having the font sizes and images auto-resize as the window changes size, etc. The main problem with this is the difficulty in getting it to work right. I've tried it a few times - I dont claim to be the most intelligent web developer - but it is fairly difficult to get going unless you use some rather sloppy layout cells in Dreamweaver (which is now impossible since Adobe has removed the layout mode from Dreamweaver CS4, for good reason).

You've got to take into consideration the difficulty in getting a resolution-independant website working, the cost to the website owner to pay the designer to implement the tech, how much information you need to display on the website at once, etc. In the case of TGC, I agree they've got some flaws in the design that could allow for some better space usage, but as it stands they do have a lot of information to put forward in each page, which means allowing the site to squash and stretch with the window size would be extremely difficult as you'd need certain areas of the page to be able to rescale to extremes. And I doubt TGC has the time right now to develop their website in multiple resolutions.


So...

Start using the maximize window and alt+tab feature.
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JoelJ
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Posted: 31st Mar 2010 03:53 Edited at: 31st Mar 2010 04:00
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I use it all the time, actually. In fact, I installed scripts on both Ubuntu and Mac that accomplishes the same thing. I use it all the time while programming. Half maximize VisualStudio/Eclipse/Xcode/Gedit/etc on the left side, and then my browser on the right side. Sometimes it's also really nice to be able to quickly pop a tab out of Chrome and quickly move it to fill perfectly the other half of the screen. I use this when posting content from one page onto a forum or something.
I've also used it a bunch while doing homework. Have Word open on one side, and whatever I'm reading on the otherside.
I was also a grader for school, and i would've hated life if I didn't have this feature. Having the key open on one side and then the student's assignment on the other half. When I open the next document, I quickly move it to the other side.

Anyway, as you can see. I love the feature.

Edit: posted at the same time.

Quote: "Start using the maximize window and alt+tab feature."

Hah! never. I hate having maximized windows. And I understand what it takes to get windows to resize and I agree with you completely that not every website can do that.

But I'll use two that I notice it in the most as an example: TGC Forums and Apple's stupid developer website.
This forum is only stretched by ADs. Lame. I don't mind that a site advertises (in fact, I don't use adblock because I feel it's the website's right to advertise while giving me free content), but I do care if an ad is forcing my window to be a certain size. That can easily be fixed.

Apple's site is similar in that it's being resized out of sheer stupidity. Looking at it there are several places they can make more flexible. It's not that the site is doing anything remarkable that makes it difficult for them to accomplish this. It's that they just didn't care. (Which is the Apple way. "My way or the highway", but that's another story.)

Your mother has been erased by a mod because it's larger than 600x120
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BearCDP
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Posted: 31st Mar 2010 05:43
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Say you wanted to make it resizable, would you just set up your CSS sizes and margins in all ems or %s rather than px or whatever else there is? Every once in a while I like to fool around with the stylesheet for my site, and it seems like it would be a fun project to make it all resizable like that. It would be purely for fun of course. Don't most people accept nowadays that site sizes are static for the most part? When a page does resize and has a slightly more sophisticated layout I'm kinda impressed (key phrase being "sophisticated layout"; thebestpageintheuniverse resizes, but I'd be disappointed if it didn't).

Alt-tabbing can also be a pain when you're hand-copying code. I'll typically have an example up on one window, while writing it in another window (IDE) but modifying it as I go to suit my needs. THANK GOD that Vista, 7, and OS X allow you to scroll the a window with the mouse wheel without giving it focus.

Check out this WIP flash game from the Global Game Jam!
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Diggsey
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Posted: 31st Mar 2010 16:19
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@BearCDP
It's not that simple lol.
- Background images can't be resized, they can only be tiled
- Certain parts of the page need to be fixed size (borders, padding, etc)
- Certain parts of the page need to be aligned in some way which would be broken be doing that

The only way to solve it for every possibility would be to control the layout of the entire page using javascript.


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