Jack William Bell's Journal: Eric Raymond has moved, but rants on nonetheless

Eric Raymond's blog 'Armed and Dangerous' has moved here. Which may be a good thing, he is certainly posting more. His latest rant tears a new asshole out of the ". . . dope-smoking ponytailed dimwits . . ." who create stylesheets with absolute font and box sizes. (AKA graphic designers...)

Such have been the bane of my existance when doing websites as well. Nothing sucks more than getting an email saying "Do the page exactly like this." with a 3 mb graphic created in photoshop attached.

P.S. I cut off my ponytail more than a month ago...

Heh

[FortKnox]

I'm neither a ponytailed dope-smoking dipshit, nor a tree hugging, bearded, hygene lacking open source hippy ;-)

Sometimes, though, the client will guarantee that all browsers will be in the following resolution (especially internal apps).

But, on the other hand, some tricks REQUIRE static box sizes, especially when you have to mix graphics in with things. Now, those in the biz can fool around with using both static AND dynamic and have good results, but I won't diss someone for sticking to static number

Re:Heh

[Jack William Bell]

Still, resolution independance is a good thing. For example it is better for visually handicapped users.

And, as to clients gaurenteeing resolution and even browser apps; that usually changes when it turns out V.P. Dimwiddy refuses to use that 'standard' browser or twenty people in Client Services are getting by with eight-year-old machines and don't have the budget to upgrade until next year...

Re:Heh

[arb]

And, as to clients gaurenteeing resolution and even browser apps; that usually changes when it turns out V.P. Dimwiddy refuses to use that 'standard' browser or twenty people in Client Services are getting by with eight-year-old machines and don't have the budget to upgrade until next year...

Or in our case, the "standard" browser being chosen as Netscape 4.7x when we started developing our app, and now users complaining that the app doesn't work in any modern browser. I argued and argued that we should be

absolute sizes

[capoccia]

absolute sizes can be used very effectively on multiple screen sizes. the design just has to use absolute sizes for border or padding and let the size of the content float.

there is also the option of specifying font sizes in inches/milimeters so it is resolution-independant.

I agree with ESR

[Sloppy]

I wish w3b d3s1ng3rz would defer as many decisions as possible to the browser. If they want to micromanage everything down to the pixel, then they might as well just have their web pages be image maps.

Re:I agree with ESR

[Red Warrior]

Either that, or send me thier monitor to view it on...