Posted by Beauregard T. Shagnasty on 03/08/06 19:18

geniolatenio wrote:

>>> http://incarta.altervista.org/indexok.html
>>
>>This link looks the same to me, in Firefox and IE6.
>
> did you resize the page in IE? like making it pretty small.. as soon
> as you hit the rightmost part of the menu with the right border of
> the browser, the menu comes down a bit..

Yes, it does. With a width of near 900px. (or wider than maybe a third
of your visitors' resolution)

Consider that most visitors will not be resizing their windows. Many
don't know how. So whatever size they are when they arrive, they will
stay. And see the menu buttons in one way only. If they are using the
still-common 800x600 screen with browser maximized, there is no chance
they will see what you consider to be a problem.

Generally speaking, only us authors fool around with different browsers
and sizes. Visitors will only ever use one browser.

>> IE users with vision problems will not be able to resize it, so they
>> can read it, when px (or pt) is used. If you use percentages (or
>> em), they will be able to resize ... (and even with px, users of all
>> modern browsers can resize - Firefox: press Control-Plus a few
>> times)
>
> Yes, I understand the point and I could even agree to it, but this is
> the age-old problem of either having a website accessible to
> everyone, modifying the layout in order to accomodate that, or trying
> to have it accessible at the most with some design exceptions..

Wouldn't you think that impaired vision visitors are used to having
pages fall apart at increased sizes? <g>

> unfortunately I want to have that background image going from the top

I don't see any images on the page ...
http://incarta.altervista.org/img/logo.gif is a 404 for example.

> of the page to the bottom.. I tried to make it by using a div,
> absolute position and z-index:1 (it has to stay behind everything
> else) stretching from top to bottom, but it just doesn't stretches..
> any ideas? Anyway, back to the design issue: by letting the user
> change the pixel size, the menu text becomes bigger and the "on"
> stage of each item becomes larger, making it larger than the
> background image.. and this looks like a mistake..

Not to a person with impaired vision.

> Means that if I could have this DIV go from top to bottom, resizing
> itself so that it changes depending on the content of the page, I
> could remove the px (I just noticed that firefox lets me change the
> font size anyway)..

Firefox is a smart browser. :-)

> Or do you know of any solution to this? I'm one of those who thinks
> that a website should be visible almost the same way on all different
> browser, accessible to most, but at the same time I shouldn't forget

Maybe if your images were displayed, some of us may see a better
solution.

> what I like and how I'd like a website to be.. the example you gave
> me, the http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/flexdesign.html, is
> a good example of flexibility, but the design really sucks.

The page is meant to impart information, not to be pretty.

> I agree that functionality is important, but the eye needs to be
> satisfied as well.

Sure, just so long as accessibility isn't affected.

--
-bts
-Warning: I brake for lawn deer

[Back to original message]