Posted by Onideus Mad Hatter on 06/28/05 02:50

On Mon, 27 Jun 2005 23:04:51 +0100, Mimic <dev@null.net> wrote:

>I would like to look into this some more, but I just landed another 2
>jobs wh00t.. but anyway...

Does this mean you won't be participating in the lil web design
challenge me and Starshine started? I told him he could have you as
his design partner to try and even out the odds a little.

>For someone who makes every effort to argue AGAINST cross browser, cross
>res and w3c valid sites, you seem to be directing alot of your sites in
>that direction - its good to see you finally took onboard what we have
>been saying - good effort...

Well as far as clients are concerned it's really a moot point. The
reason I do it is primarily for the challenge, I thrive off
competition and rivalry.

....bother...*spits out a bit of plastic*...Sundae's Neapolitan Coconut
candies taste real good, but they seriously need to rethink their
wrappers...

>It will be good for resizing the bg images of sites, you could make some
>very nice designs with it. One problem I imagine you will have though,
>is animated gifs, so that might be worth looking into next.

I haven't yet tried it with animated GIFs, resizing shouldn't be a
problem, but I don't yet know if PHP supports animated GIFs...not
that, that would be too terrible a problem, I can construct an
animated sequence out of static GIFs using JavaScript.

With this new design EVERYTHING will be resized, so what you see on a
1024x768 res will be EXACTLY what you see on an 800x600 res.

>What you could also do, to eliminate cookies etc, is to grab the
>dimensions, bang a forward on the index to itself with the dimensions as
>GET variables, if the variables exist, process the image, if not (get
>them and fwd).

Hrmmm...I might do that, if I can mask the URL...possibly via an
iframe.

>To overcome any limitations on resolution/sizing varieties, youre going
>to need to come up with a method to resize more than just static images
>- youve got flash,

Oh Flash is simple, it has built in resizing that's pretty decent.
However I don't plan on making all my sites completely in Flash any
time soon as I believe that's an incredibly BAD thing to do...I mean
people complain about Microsoft monopolizing the web...YEESH!

> anim gifs, java applets, video streams etc etc,
>otherwise youre going to limit yourself to just text/image sites - but
>it is a step in the right direction.

GIFs I've already covered, Java Applets I'm not too worried about and
video streams will resize using whatever base core you're running off
of, usually WMP, which has good resizing capabilities built in.

Text is actually the hard/impossible part, since font support varies
and font display and alignment vary from browser to browser. Which is
why I support more non-traditional means of incorporating
text...basically using 2+ color GIFs. It doesn't significantly
increase the overall size of the site and allows for EXACT placement
and EXACT sizing. Plus you can also use fancier fonts that way as
well as textures, shadows, etc, etc. The histology site is a good
example:
All the text on there was created using PNG files with a single color
transparency, turned out quite nice and the total site size is only
about a half megabyte, that's pretty bad ass right there...only
downside is that in order to do it, it requires a rather in depth,
expert level understanding of graphic formats and compression.

>How do you handle resizing of different ratio's?

I'm going to base it off a set max res of 1003x596 which is the max
default viewing area in IE on a 1024x768 res. The site will still
resize nice on resolutions higher than that, but any larger than 20%
of that and it'll start to be noticeable...but it won't be jagged
lookin.

According to my stats there's not a whole lot of people on resolutions
higher than 1024x768 and the ones that are, are still in close range
so as not to make any noticeable difference. Anything at, or smaller
than 1024x768 and it'll look completely flawless, even arbitrary
widths, such as a windowed screen.

Using that base res of 1003x596 all I have to do is take the image
size, like let's say 100x20 and then do a lil math:

100 / 1003 = .0997

So when the clientwidth changes it only has to take that value and
multiply it by .0997 to get the new image width. And then the height
can be found using the existing method which looks at the aspect ratio
of the original image.

Tres simple, non?

--

Onideus Mad Hatter
mhm ¹ x ¹
http://www.backwater-productions.net

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