Exam 1A
Exam 1B
Exam 2A
Exam 2B
Exam 3A
Exam 3B
Charles Muench
UNLV CS - 641
Dr. Nina Cooper
February 27, 2005
When the web first became popular, the screen size was 640 pixels by 480 pixels. Then, in the mid 1990s screen sizes of 800 pixels by 600 pixels began to appear. By 2000, screen sizes of 1024 pixels by 768 started to be common place. Today most new systems can display at least 1280 pixels by 1024 pixels because the monitors, whether conventional CRT or flat panel LCD, have gone from a 12 to 13 inch diagonal display to 17 to 19 inch diagonal or higher with the new wide format screens. These wide format screens first appeared on the new I-Mac.
In the mid 1990s, most websites were takeoffs of the conventional paper publications' style. This meant that a fixed format of roughly 600 pixels wide by whatever length, that was required to present the text information, fitted the original 13 inch screen size quite nicely. According to a generally accepted concept from the printing industry, a person can easily read up to a maximun of 60 characters, that is 6 to 8 inches in width, without his eyes tiring, which is the reason that most books and magazines fit this format. In fact, a lot of magazines will divide the text information into several columns to keep the information in this 60 character maximun range. This is especially true if the font is small.
A 60 character ruler is shown below.
123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789
With the advent of wider screens and advances in web programming, one can now, by using style sheets, create pages that are 14 to 16 inches in wide, having a pixel width of greater than 1000 pixels. With a font size of 10 pixels, this means that more than 100 characters can be displayed in a single line. Unless the text information will fit into one screen height, one can't very well use multi-columns for the text like you would do in a magazine. Also, unlike using paper medium, one never knows what size screen or window the text information will be displayed in.
My proposed solution to this new problem of ever wider screens with more and more pixels is to almost never use a fixed font size, because the user will have no control over the font size, but use a relative font size in the websites style sheets. A relative font size allows the user to change the website's font with ease to suit his individual needs. Also, when one uses a table to pour the text into, do not fix the table's width. The web page can have special fixed width table columns to the left and right of the main article's text, which can be used for graphic images or navagation, but always leave the major text column free of width control.
This means that a user with a wide pixel count screen can choose to increase his browser's default font size so that the text is more readable, and he can get the displayed characters down to a more readable level of 60 characters per page width. Also, no one knows to what width the user has set his browser. If the user has an old system with a 600 pixel width screen, and the web page has fixed the text table width to 1000 pixels, which would be OK for most commercial users of the web, then the user will surely leave the site because scrolling, from left to right, in order to read a single line of text is unforgiveable. Another advantage of allowing the text to free flow in an unconstrained table width is that printing can be done without chopping the right side of the article off.
The results of these design concepts can be viewed by going to the following website that has this article:
Gillespie, Joe. Webpage design for designers-typography.
Retrieved February 24, 2005
Wakerman, Lois. Article: page widths and font sizes in web pages.
Retrieved February 25, 2005
Will-Harris, Daniel. The Best Faces for the Screen.
Retrieved February 25, 2005
