no more horizontal scrolling, not a lost fight
Monday, 21. September 2009, 02:53:08
Set rendering mode to use at startup
0 = Normal
1 = SSR
2 = CSSR
3 = AMSR
4 = MSR
-1 = Fit to width
I first though "wow, I can make 'fit to width' mode the default, cool", but as I was intrigued by the meaning of the other rendering modes I did a little research and found the following information:
The rendering technologies that ERA utilizes are Medium Screen Rendering (MSR), Aggressive MSR (AMSR), Small Screen Rendering (SSR), Color SSR (CSSR), Television Rendering (TVR), and normal screen rendering.
MSR is generally suited to smaller computer monitors, AMSR is generally suited to PDAs, CSSR is suited to mobile phones and low-resolution PDAs, and SSR is suited to low-resolution mobile phones. Each of these applies more aggressive reformatting and scaling, restructuring pages to remove the minimum widths enforced by tables or fluid designs. TVR is suited to most televisions, where problems caused by small fonts, interlaced displays, and high contrasts can also be avoided.
After reading the documentation of "ERA" I wanted to give MSR mode a try.
So I made the change, restarted opera, opened my DDPO page which usually requires an ugly horizontal scroll bar and immediately noticed the difference: all the content was adjusted to fit in the screen.
Although the effect is quite similar (if not identical) to the "fit to width" option, it is a great improvement over normal web browsing in a "small" screen (1024x600).
I am not completely satisfied by the results, but at least happy. I hope this technology is going to be improved, and that even other browsers start developing such kind of technology.
WIDGETIZE
Anonymous # 21. September 2009, 18:39
"I hope this technology is going to be improved, and that even other browsers start developing such kind of technology."
I hope NOT!
That "technology" is just a hack to fix poorly designed web pages.
Everything about HTML and CSS works to make no assumptions about display size, using the concept of "flow" (e.g. line breaks in a paragraph) to allow the rendering of content in any context (size/width).
Poorly designed webpages (mostly coming from the fixed world of printed graphic design) are at fault, and introducing technology to crutch them is counterproductive.
I always had this rant, but could only justify it from a "what is right" perspective. Now that many are actually using a variety of display environment for content display, it's time for designers to actually learn what's been in the web specs for a decade now.
Raphael # 22. September 2009, 02:23
Originally posted by anonymous:
I do agree that websites should be fixed, but I must also say that users can't always be left under the hope that someday those websites will be fixed.