Realising the limitations of Web I tried to design my new Psion web pages so that they'd display well in Web. I cut down on large graphical displays and tried to do as much as possible using colour (well, grey) backgrounds and a few icons and thumbnails. I've also used tables with HEIGHT and WIDTH tags for layout control.
The results aren't particularly successful in my view. What I've ended up with are pages that still don't display properly in Web. Compatibility is excellent - the pages look equally drab and uninteresting in all browsers.
The problems I've found are various. Subtle colours don't work well with the 256-colour palette (and are obviously worse with 4 greyscales), but too much variation in backgrounds makes for unreadable text. Web seems to have its own criteria for interpreting WIDTH tags, and seems to ignore HEIGHT tags altogether. Some images are clipped rather than scaled.
All this leads to my question: are there any ideas or techniques for creating visually interesting pages that will display properly in Web? Presumably Web must have been able to cope with what was on line in 1999, and there were some visually interesting pages then. I'd be really interested in doing something that looks good in Web AND on modern PC-based browsers. Are there any sites that appear to do this?
In article <Pine.LNX.4.64.0801041055410.16...@nero.devel.snigfarp.karoo.net>,
Damian Walker wrote: > All this leads to my question: are there any ideas or techniques for > creating visually interesting pages that will display properly in Web?
You're going somewhat off-track making your pages use shades of grey. The people with Psion programming skills will be able to elaborate, but to a first approximation the graphics engine in Psion (and underlying Web) will resolve the luminance of each pixel of an image to a value appropriate for the display. EPOC can (IIRC) handle 16 distinct colours, which in the Psion 5 (family) are mapped onto 4 levels of grey while the NetBook/ Psion 7 family can actually display colours. What you need to do is choose colours expressed as RGB (Red Green Blue) triples, where the components combine pleasantly in a colour-capable browser, don't strobe too badly in a dithered 16-colour display (7 series), and which have luminances ( Lum = (R + G + B)/3 ) which will map to appropriate levels of grey (5 series). That would then allow the page to display legibly and pleasantly in all the targeted range of pages. Your web server should be able to interrogate the browser for an identification string, so that by using an appropriate CSS style sheet, different colours or images could be sent to the requesting browser. That might be simpler than choosing your colour so carefully.
ISTR there were help documents about this in some of the programming guides for the Psion, but I've not got any of those to hand.
While I love my Psions and make a lot of use of them, I don't dispute that the 4-level grey screen is a huge step down from modern systems. Having said that, since I do a lot of work at the command line, I still appreciate the difference between 1-bit per pixel and 2 bits per pixel. What is an open question to me is - can the fortnight-on-2xAA-cells endurance so important to Psions be achieved with a colour screen? Maybe, maybe not. But it's definitely an important question.
-- Aidan Karley, Aberdeen, Scotland Written at Sat, 05 Jan 2008 11:51 GMT, but posted later. 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
In article <Pine.LNX.4.64.0801041055410.16...@nero.devel.snigfarp.karoo.net>, Damian Walker <dam...@snigfarp.karoo.co.uk> wrote:
> All this leads to my question: are there any ideas or techniques for > creating visually interesting pages that will display properly in Web?
If I recall rightly, I used fairly bold but web safe colours (an obsolete idea, but there are still good articles available on web safe colors). The Psion Web seemed to be able to handle the translation to grey (and on a Psion 7 looked fine ... but was that using the Opera browser?)
I think I left all the type sizes to the default setting of the browser.
The html was all left very simple, with really only the six heading levels, and paragraph markers. I did use some borders around some items. I never tried more than two columns set by divs (I had a lot of navigation). Minimal styling was in CSS. As I recall, Web could handle simple CSS.
However it has been a long time since I wrote anything specifically for a Psion browser. These days I keep my HTML very simple. I don't use tables. Then I add minimal divs for areas like headers, footers. I style everything with CSS. If a browser can't handle CSS at all, it still usually does a good job with the HTML.
I really must go though and clean up my old Psion Epoc pages. A lot of links have (alas) disappeared over the years. I like leaving the URI without a link however, so that if they wish, people can use the Wayback Machine to try to find Psion sites that have now disappeared.
I really dislike the idea of browser sniffing. Although these days with the very rapid rise of iPhone browsing, I am thinking of setting a meta for viewpoint to the default display width and height of any Webkit like device, so they can decide how to handle my content. That won't affect any other browser.
> Realising the limitations of Web I tried to design my new Psion web pages > so that they'd display well in Web. I cut down on large graphical > displays and tried to do as much as possible using colour (well, grey) > backgrounds and a few icons and thumbnails. I've also used tables with > HEIGHT and WIDTH tags for layout control.
> The results aren't particularly successful in my view. What I've ended up > with are pages that still don't display properly in Web. Compatibility is > excellent - the pages look equally drab and uninteresting in all browsers.
> The problems I've found are various. Subtle colours don't work well with > the 256-colour palette (and are obviously worse with 4 greyscales), but > too much variation in backgrounds makes for unreadable text. Web seems to > have its own criteria for interpreting WIDTH tags, and seems to ignore > HEIGHT tags altogether. Some images are clipped rather than scaled.
> All this leads to my question: are there any ideas or techniques for > creating visually interesting pages that will display properly in Web? > Presumably Web must have been able to cope with what was on line in 1999, > and there were some visually interesting pages then. I'd be really > interested in doing something that looks good in Web AND on modern > PC-based browsers. Are there any sites that appear to do this?
> You're going somewhat off-track making your pages use shades of grey. > [...] What you need to do is choose colours expressed as RGB (Red > Green Blue) triples,
Thanks for your reply. I understand about the colour - the choice of grey was nothing to do with monochrome screens (I tend to test Web compatibility on an S7), it was just a design choice. I had considered using different colours as a way to thematically distinguish between different areas of the site.
I didn't bother in the end, simply because I think the design is dull whether in monochrome or colour. My own personal homepage (damian.snigfarp.karoo.net/damian) uses grey in a far more interesting way, but these are completely invisible in Web, which displays the whole lot terribly (even if you go straight to the main frame home.html, even if I changed the PNG email address for a GIF or JPG).
What I'm hoping to find is a bit of advice on how to make a page like damian.snigfarp.karoo.net/damian/ (or even /home.html) display as well in Web as in, say, Firefox or IE. I tried to do this by simplifying the pages so as not to use anything Web didn't have, while keeping the design reasonably attractive, and it's in that attempt that I failed.
> ISTR there were help documents about this in some of the > programming guides for the Psion, but I've not got any of those to hand.
I'll have a look around for these as I get time. Do you have a starting point that would speed up my search?
> If I recall rightly, I used fairly bold but web safe colours (an > obsolete idea, but there are still good articles available on web safe > colors). The Psion Web seemed to be able to handle the translation to > grey (and on a Psion 7 looked fine ... but was that using the Opera > browser?)
I'll have to try your pages on Web, next time I'm on line. I know that they look good in Firefox. I never thought of CSS before starting this discussion. Given Web's difficulties with tables, I hadn't even considered that it would handle CSS.
> I don't use tables.
I think that's the key. They might work fine for tabular information, which is of course what they're meant for, but I'm coming to the conclusion that unlike with other browsers, Web isn't particularly good at rendering the kind of table used for formatting purposes.
> I really dislike the idea of browser sniffing.
I don't really have the option even if I wanted to use it. As I'm using ISP web space, there are few server-side facilities, and JavaScript of course wouldn't work at all in Web.
> I think that's the key. They might work fine for tabular information, which > is of course what they're meant for, but I'm coming to the conclusion that > unlike with other browsers, Web isn't particularly good at rendering the kind > of table used for formatting purposes.
I've finally found a way, and it still uses tables - and nested tables at that. The result is at the link in my signature, if anyone's interested.
The limitations I had to work around for Web are mainly: it doesn't show background images in tables; it doesn't honour the VALIGN tag; it doesn't honour the HEIGHT tag in tables; it doesn't honour BGCOLOR in tables or table rows, but it does in table cells; transparent GIFs have transparent areas filled in white. I noticed that Internet Explorer doesn't always honour HEIGHT tags either.
I've worked around most of these by specifying a background colour as well as a background image for table cells that use backgrounds. I've also abandoned the idea of designing pages to fit, centred, on a single screen. The lack of transparency in GIFs is still a problem, but I like my rounded buttons so I'll put up with that problem.
Problems that remain affect only Opera and IE. In Opera 5.14, if you zoom out to fit everything width-wise on the screen, then background images are neither scaled nor repositioned for the new layout. IE5 doesn't honour the HEIGHT tag on the sidebar, so very long pages (like http://psion.snigfarp.karoo.net/psion/psiongames.html) will have the sidebar background graphic repeated. Opera and Firefox render this properly.
So while the results in Web look like some badly-made lego construction, at least everything is where it should be, and the results in other browsers are much more interesting.
In article <Pine.LNX.4.64.0802130718230.13...@nero.devel.snigfarp.karoo.net>, Damian Walker <dam...@snigfarp.karoo.co.uk> wrote:
> So while the results in Web look like some badly-made lego construction, > at least everything is where it should be, and the results in other > browsers are much more interesting.
As a matter of interest I checked it in an Apple iPod Touch, and the results were just fine for reading. Your buttons looked OK, for example, and zooming text worked fairly sensibly.
> As a matter of interest I checked it in an Apple iPod Touch, and the > results were just fine for reading. Your buttons looked OK, for example, > and zooming text worked fairly sensibly.
I'm glad to hear that it's working in browsers I've not even heard of! I've also checked it out in links and lynx. Lynx in particular works better with this than with any other site that I've done, so I'm quite pleased. I've yet to try it out with Konqueror.
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