Posted by cwdjrxyz on 05/31/06 07:16

dorayme wrote:

> What are your or anyone's favourite examples of serious
> commercial (with much product and complexity, need for photos)
> webpages that enable some folk to enjoy the benefits of their big
> screens (normal landscape/approx.4:3) while avoiding irritating
> those with a 700px limit? Yes, all is a trade off. But be nice to
> ground this in examples.

Here is a quite complex set of commercial set of pages for you. This
company sells good, and sometimes expensive, painting reproductions.
Thus the images are very important. Since they have many paintings to
sell, they have many pages of small thumbnail images. But even here
some run up to 20 KB size. If you like one, you can click to learn more
and be taken to a description and somewhat larger picture that may be
100 KB or more in some cases. If you are more interested you can select
to view close up. This takes you to a considerably larger image that
can be zoomed greatly to examine details of the painting close up. The
zoom feature is done with flash.

The code on the pages is not perfect, but better than what I see on
many commercial sites. The W3C validator only finds 3 errors on the
main page, and these do not seem to cause problems. I know of many
commercial sites that have over 50 errors on the main page. The code is
somewhat old fashioned and uses an elaborate table structure. The page
will not work at all without script being turned on. I am not sure how
much of a problem this might be, if any. My impression is that so many
major commercial and financial sites in North America, that handle
credit transactions on line, require javascript that most people expect
to have it turned on when they visit such sites. I am not suggesting
that this site is a good example of how to write modern code. I am just
pointing out how they handle images that are very important for their
sales.

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