If any one cares to see the way I am working on my website. Debugging and suggestions are really welcome.
Thank you all in advance.

Pasha

PS. sorry for an "off topic" post.


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-[ It's just another night; good morning Webmasters! ]-

I care, but I can't see it. You didn't say where it is!

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Bob Connors
bobsie@orphanage.com
www.orphanage.com/goodstuff/
goodstufflists.home.ml.org/

C'mon Bobsie, what my profile is for?
it's at http://find.virtualave.net

It's 2:45 in the morning...

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-[ It's just another night; good morning Webmasters! ]-

I can't find a way to see your profile but since I've been up all night, that might explain it. So how would I do that?

Anyway, I went to your site and took a look. Overall, it appears to have good structure. I looked at it with both Netscape Navigator Gold v3.04 and Netscape Navigator v4.05. I did this to see how it looks with your style sheet (v3.04 doesn't use them).

In v3.04, background is dull gray and there is an awful lot of white-space on the left and right of your table. So much so, that the number of links wraps for some of the longer category names.

In v4.05, the category name itself wraps; for example, Communications and Networking wraps after the word "and" while in v3.04, just the number of links gets wrapped.

In v4.05, there is still quite a bit of white-space on both sides. Not that white-space is bad. But trying to cut it back so you can use more of the screen for your table would probably eliminate the word-wrapping. I guess you would need to adjust your settings in the .css file to do that. I don't know because I don't use the .css file.

Anyway, looks like you are on the right-track to me. Good job!

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Bob Connors
bobsie@orphanage.com
www.orphanage.com/goodstuff/
goodstufflists.home.ml.org/

The profile of the person, who posted a message on this BBS, located at the top of the message that was posted. Or you can get it from:

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/scripts/forum/ubbmisc.cgi?action=getbio&UserName=Pasha

if it's UserName=Pasha then you'll get my profile, if it's UserName=Bobsie the you'll get your profile ...
Well, you got the idea

BTW: I don't really understand, what kind of white spaces you were talking about, but I made some changes to my website, see if it got fixed.
And there might be another problem many people have different resolution, like for example I do 800x600, but some people might have 640x480. So, you can't really control the spaces on your webpage. That's (I think), why Yahoo have their front page set to 640x480, so every one will see the same thing. But if you go to any sub/directory in Yahoo (for exampl: http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/), and will try to resize your webbrowser, then you'll probably see a pretty ugly thing, like lines go on lines and pictures mixed with other pictures... Definately, not a good thing to have on your website

BTW2: I don't have NNavigator 3.x installed, do you know where I can get it?


Pasha

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-[ It's just another night; good morning Webmasters! ]-

  
No wonder I couldn't find it! It was too simple!


The white-space was in the left and right margins of each page (that I looked at). Combined, it seemed to be nearly 30% of each screen. Even the horizontal rules, which you had set with a width of 100%, did not really go 100% over the screen. Not that they should, but it almost looked like they were inside of blockquotes, which, of course, they were not.

My resolution is set to 800x600 which is rapidly becoming the default resolution for most web sites.


It looks a lot better. If I may make a suggestion, You have your first <td> set to a width of 60%. Try experimenting with that, increasing its width (while decreasing the <td> for the menu correspondingly) to give more room to the category table and less to the menu table, to give a more balanced look to the margins on both sides of the screen. In NN 3.04, the left margin looks good while the right margin is a lot wider. In 4.05, while the left/right margins are more balanced, the second category column appears a lot further from the menu table then it does from the first category column.


Try tucows.phoenix.net/adnload/dlnetscape304.html . I am not sure whether this is the Gold version or not.

Take care!

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Bob Connors
bobsie@orphanage.com
www.orphanage.com/goodstuff/
goodstufflists.home.ml.org/




[This message has been edited by Bobsie (edited February 04, 1999).]

Just wanna say that if your going to build for one resolution, 640x480 is the safe way to go, as most people still have that res.

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bj
studiosg - www.skymedia-graphics.com

Everyone (using a PC) had 640x480 resolution. However, most web pages being built today default to 800x600, thus my comment about it becoming a new standard.

A lot of sites build their pages using 640x480 but, since that ends up showing a lot of extra space at the right side of the screen when viewed in 800x600, they put extra text there for people using 800x600 resolution. The people who use 640x480 resolution don't even see it and the people who use 800x600 think everyone sees it.

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Bob Connors
bobsie@orphanage.com
www.orphanage.com/goodstuff/
goodstufflists.home.ml.org/




[This message has been edited by Bobsie (edited February 04, 1999).]

Bobsie, I totally agree with you. For the past four years on the internet I've seen lots of different websites, and most (I don't count personal pages) of them have changed their layout to 800x600. But they do have an option for guys, with 640x480; for example take "Download.com" or "Yahoo.com" they got 640x480, but it still looks nice with 800x600. Or there's another good example, on "www.Hackers.com" they made a pretty good website, but it looks totaly screwed up under resolution of 640x480.
And, as far as I know most of universities, schools and colleges in U.S. use resolution 640x480, so you never know who comes to your website and with what kind of resolution. Plus, one guy told me, that on Macintosh webpages looks different that on PCs. Since Mac becomes a little more popular in U.S. and other countries, we should keep in mind that some one views our pages in an absolutely different way.

Conclusion:
Make it simple, so every damn idiot will understand, what the hell it is.

Pasha

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-[ It's just another night; good morning Webmasters! ]-

Hi,

As a web designer for 4 years I follow standards to the tee. The industry standard was 640 x 480 until 13 months ago when most of the leading internet blue chips got together to agree that 800 x 600 should be the standard.

You can understand why, when 15" is now the standard entry monitor size which go well above 800 x 600 displays, making 640 x 480 designed site an terriable visiting experience, but also because most people don't know that 14" on the whole go upto 800x600 anyway, using a very cheap video card which most people have anyway.

Now the bit about the mac. Apple mac browsers display the fonts 3 points smaller than on the PC. This makes them smaller on screen which inturn can mess up pages.

There is a way to try and help this out by setting the mac browser default font setting slightly bigger than the PC version.

eg: On a PC, set font to medium (default setting) and on the mac change it to large. They should now appear almost the same.

However as a designer you can only design for medium and hope people have changed there mac browser settings.

Martin

Martin Pitt, where did you get the information about ... 13 months ago? I'd really like to take a look at it.

Pasha

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-[ It's just another night; good morning Webmasters! ]-

Hi Pasha,

Give me a couple of days. I will try and put my hands on it for you.

However I think it was in a UK New Media magazine called New Media Age, which I don't personally get, however I think similar stuff has been placed inside UK Internet Magazines anyway.

Martin

Or one could say, if you design web pages on a Macintosh, that PCs display fonts 3 points larger

I have to run a Windows emulator to check my layouts under Windows 95/98... I wish Apple and Microsoft would get together and agree to display fonts at the same sizes.. it's weird. Windows seems to display images smaller than Mac OS, but displays fonts larger.

--gotta go off and tell my Windows users to please set their font size to "smaller"--

Jake

Wait Jake,

That's only if they use Internet Explorer. There ain't no "smaller" or "medium" in Netscape's browsers. Netscape uses font sizes that vary from font type to font type. I don't know what other browsers use!

Are we having fun yet?

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Bob Connors
bobsie@orphanage.com
www.orphanage.com/goodstuff/
goodstufflists.home.ml.org/

What? You mean people still use Netscape?

Ahh, maybe more will soon, the way the trial is going. Actually, you can change the base font size in Netscape's preferences, but it's not as easily accessible as it is in IE.

Bobsie, I don't know what you mean by saying that "There ain't no smaller or medium in Netscape...", but I know for sure that if you press <Ctrl and [> the size of ANY text gets smaller, and if <Ctrl and ]> gets bigger; plus there're HTML tags: <FONT SIZE=-1>, <FONT SIZE=-2>, <FONT SIZE=+1>, <FONT SIZE=+2>, etc.

Which browser is popular? I don't remember for sure where, but I've seen a website that has a rating of what kind of web browsers people use. And on the top was IExplorer, but it probably came with Windows9x
Personaly I have nothing against IExplorer, but I prefer to use NNavigator 'cause it didn't crash as much IExplorer did

--> Martin Pitt
Please, if you've got time, find this information for me. And thank you in advance.

Pasha

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-[ It's just another night; good morning Webmasters! ]-

When designing webpages it well known that we must test them (at least) on IE and Netscape, the market leadings. So almost all of us have IE and Netscape installed and of course each one has preferences for one or another. Now only talking about navigation I would go with Pasha. No crashing problems using Netscape (cannot say the same about IE).
Personaly I prefer and think Netscape is superior.
Those of you who have both IE and Netscape can see why by visiting the below "Test Directory" using both browsers (4.0 browsers only). Anylise their performance loading and scrolling the page. The page uses DHTML and gif's only.

http://martial-arts.hypermart.net/test


Volpi

Pasha,

I tried the Ctrl-[ and Ctrl-] thingy. It is not functional in Netscape 3 at all and, in Netscape 4, only refreshed the screen and when it came back, no change in the font size. Perhaps that was added to Netscape 4.5 (I have 4.05).

Here is the top 15 agents used at my site for January 1999 extracted from my stats. Other months show Netscape as the most used, while still others show IE and Netscape about even.


I agree with volpi, it is necessary to have both browsers for testing and, multiple versions of both. I even have a Windows95/98/NT verions of the text browser, Lynx, installed. When I design my pages, I look at them with all the browsers to be sure everything is just right. It was one of the reasons I took cascading style sheet (css) usage out of my copy of Links v2b5. It was just too difficult to get my pages to look good in all browsers when using the css, especially in those browsers that don't support css.

I used to prefer MSIE over Netscape even though I used Netscape long before MSIE. I switched because MSIE had a lot of other problems when visiting sites that caused it to crash. I now use NN almost exclusively for browsing and MSIE just for testing.

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Bob Connors
bobsie@orphanage.com
www.orphanage.com/goodstuff/
goodstufflists.home.ml.org/




[This message has been edited by Bobsie (edited February 06, 1999).]

I only would say something to the crashing problem of the browsers:

have you ever used css with netscape? try this: fonts-size: 12pt; - the original tag must be font-size: 12pt;

I you look to this page with netscape, netscape crashes completeley. OK, it's a very big mistake :-)

Also: are you running netscape and explorer at once? may be the explorer crashes. cause he don't wanna run together with other browsers.

All at all: if netscape don't features up there communicator/navigator they will lost a lot of users. cause the IE includes much, much, much more features then netscape. specially talking ie. about css and tables. It's too bad with netscape. also ns don't accepts hovering links. and so on,

i've seen on my stats within the last months much more visitors have changed to the IE!

hurry up netscape - cause i don't like to use microsofts :-)

PS: anybody is working with IE5? the pages will look different to all we know :-( - (no big differents, but destroying differents (?) - means: the frame-layout i.e. i know a page where i couldn't see a link within a frame with the IE5 but with IE4 they're still there - clicking with the mouse in the frame and scrolling down and you'll get the links in the IE5 - if you don't know this mistake, visitors couldn't browse trough your sites.)

cu
take a look a Language Links v1.0 alpha :-)

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www.ford-network.at

Bobsie, I use Netscape Communicator Pro 4.5 on Windows 98, plus IExplorer 4.
I don't know, why <Ctrl-[> doesn't work for you. It sure may be not included in 4.05, but do you have an option to increase font in "View menu"? It might be there...
And Bogus is right, I had more crashes of IExplorer, when I used it together with NNavigator. But, some times, when I visit page with too many java scripts, NNavigator may act a little slow, when IExplorer goes with an "Illegal Operation..." error
I didn't have that many errors in IExplorer 2.x and 3.x, it's only 4.x gets screwed up. Some times it crashes, when I click on the links right when the page loads, or I just click too fast too many times.
I my school, one PC had IE4 crashed, and after that half of the desktop was missing (missing - blank dark vertical lines), we tried to refresh screen by pressing <F5>, restarting computer, but it was coming again and again... we had no choice but to reinstall win95. I think that this happened because IE4 messes with shell and/or replaces it (I don't know what Microsoft did it for, but I know for sure, that to uninstall IE4, you got to reformat your hard disk)
And there're always good news: I havn't got NNavigator crash. Well, it did crash a few times, but it was only after I tried to make changes in "netscape.exe" file.

Conclusion:
Life is good, when you got a good web browser

Pasha

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-[ It's just another night; good morning Webmasters! ]-

Hi,

Bogus visited the page i suggested (thanks bogus) and reported that he couldn't see the fields for member login and new members (at the left of the page). He used Navigator 4.05

I would appreciate any other comments from those of you who have 4.0 Browsers.

Just to remember the address:

http://martial-arts.hypermart.net/test


Thanks

Eduardo

No problem volpi, I've got NNavogator 4.5 and, when I visited your page, every thing was alright: text fields for new users, old members, submit and clear buttons, etc. Everything was ok, and the page looks great.

Pasha

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-[ It's just another night; good morning Webmasters! ]-

whoa

Thank yoouuu!


Volpi

I just made a totaly new layout for Links 2.0
If any one interested, take a look:
http://find.virtualave.net

Suggestions are really welcome!

Pasha

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-[ It's just another night; good morning Webmasters! ]-