More Progress!

I’m approximately 62% complete with the Holy Grail Screenplay conversion (total progress of what was already online: ~75%). I’m trying something new with the Python site (when compared to my personal TWiki you’re visiting right now): You’ll notice (if you have a screen resolution > 800×600) that the title and footer bars (the parts in maroon) go all the way across the screen (table = 100%), but the central text doesn’t go that far. The inner table is set to 800 pixels wide (200 reserved for the sidebar, and 600 for main text). This was done to give a consistent look to the site (regardless of browser). The main downside to this is the audience.

How many people still use 640×480 or 800×600 resolutions? Many, for many different reasons (of which many are valid). The major problem with TWiki and low resolutions is clutter. Even if you create or modify your own templates, there can still be a lot of clutter which is overly obvious in those modes. I used to design for 640×480 in mind. Not any more. If you’re stuck in that land, there ought to be a good reason…and you should know how to modify your browser text sizes and such to make it work better. But that’s just my opinion.

Now, I still design for 800×600, but that’s tough too. So I set the master layouts to 800 pixels wide, which creates minimal horizontal scroll for the 800×600 people, and still looks good in 1280×1024. Sadly, the 640×480 people are hopelessly lost, but see my argument above.

I don’t anticipate changing the templates for this site to make the text go at 100% width (as I’m going to test on the Python site), but since the Python site is the most heavily viewed site, I figured it best to give it a shot and see what happens. The 640×480 people will still have much clutter, but no horizontal scroll in that land.

In other news…

I’ve made the major font change for the MZ Online logo. It’s no longer done in a Times font, which makes me happy. It’s still semi-formal (e.g. a font you can read), but not frilly (non-blocky).

And with that, I leave you to ponder…

This post was upgraded to the MZ Online Blog on 8/20/07