Bite the bullet, spend money on yourself

[J M Fahey]

Nerdy kids who write those webpages don't have a car, girlfriend or even cool clothes, so they spend all their money on supercharged Nasa type computers and 26" monitors ... and write for best effect on *those*.
And, since they are stored locally, couldn't care less about bandwidth or speed.
Company owners don't care either, are too busy on the money side of the business.

[cminor9]

Nerdy kids who write those webpages don't have a car, girlfriend or even cool clothes, so they spend all their money on supercharged Nasa type computers and 26" monitors ... and write for best effect on *those*.
And, since they are stored locally, couldn't care less about bandwidth or speed.
Company owners don't care either, are too busy on the money side of the business.

I am sure you are at least half-joking, but I am one of those nerdy developer kids who has a family, a car, a mortgage, well you got me on the clothes because I gotta find some $ to buy gear with, well, you get the idea.

Here's the deal: it's all about your screen resolution less than the physical size of the monitor*. There are certainly many bad designs that do not degrade well, but honestly I have yet to see a professional outfit fail to support a reasonable browser resolution. That said, there is a certain resolution below which we are just not going to care. If some dude wants to cling to his circa 1995 15" monitor that MIGHT support 600x800 *if* you turn the refresh rate waaay down, then he has to accept that he is outdated. He is that guy in the far right lane of the highway driving the yugo. That guy can't expect everyone else to slow down to accommodate him.

* though high resolution on a small monitor will certainly be tiny, and I concede this point. Many people in my profession are under 40 and do not consider people with waning eyesight and this is most unfortunate. Happily, browsers these days can pretty easily magnify the text. I find myself doing this at times too.

[J M Fahey]

Dear Friend Cminor.
Be sure I'm half joking.
Now, which half? That's the big
It's a no brainer:
I'm still a nerdy kid , proud of it, and have been so since I was 4 y.o.
As of the second half, it's also a no brainer: I'm not complaining about the "small letters" at all (even beyond 40 , that wonderful invention: reading glasses, solves it) but about designing for the top 5% of the Market.
Commercially, that's an unforgiveable Sin.
A very annoying activity is jumping right and left, because a few letters are displayed beyond the monitor edge.
No matter what the technical advances, there will always be a spread of monitor resolutions or sizes chosen by the end users, if for no other reason because (agreed), most will buy the monitor-of-the-week at WalMart , a few tightfists will cling to old junk (ok, disregard them, bad clients anyway), many will use smaller screens for practical reasons (notebooks, or even worse tablets or cellphones) and a few will have " the biggest with the mostest", in this case wasting screen size.
That's my gripe.
I would love to see more page designs with flowable text (which is easy) and maybe some dynamic design for the page architecture, ideally allowing some self-arranging images display, auto-adaptable to different screen sizes or resolutions, still keeping an agreeable visual balance.
Although I bet such pages will be much more difficult to write.
Dear Friend, congratulations on your Home, Work and Family, those are the good things which keep us advancing along the road.
I think it's clear there never was the slightest intention of offending anybody, but if any of my words seems so, please accept my apologies.

[cminor9]

I think it's clear there never was the slightest intention of offending anybody, but if any of my words seems so, please accept my apologies.

Oh, no offense taken, I know you were joking! I just said that because I didn't want to see like a jerk for replying in a somewhat serious manner.

And yeah, I agree with you on the usability stuff, though I have been pretty happy navigating the web with my iPad with I think is 1024x768. There are a few sites where horizontal scolling is necessary, but with the iPad's touch UI (or my macbook's touchpad) these things are less annoying than they were with the mouse.

I'll tell you the thing that *really* gets my goat when I use a mobile device to navigate the web: those annoying interstitial pages that try to get you to download the iPad app! Just show me the site!

[guitarmike2107]

Bite the bullet, spend money on yourself....

This is something I battle with, I am very tight fisted about spending money friviously on myself... my wife on the other hand is free of any spending guilt.

saying that I have just got a new weller soldering station, a band saw and my hobby CNC milling machine is on order for November... but those are working man tools... not toys