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The 'tiling' of the internet... is there a choice?

NanLaew

By NanLaew
in IT and Computers

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NanLaew Star Member

NanLaew

Posted
Posted

A few years back in the early days of android, a lot of websites used to offer two versions of their web page. One would be the standard one for computers and laptops and conventional viewing whilst the other, upon miraculously detecting you were using a smart phone, would offer a optional viewer, typically prefixed with an 'm.' for mobile that reformatted size and orientation for dinky little screens and pudgy fingers.

Over the last 6 months or so, I have seen more websites changing their design and colour palette to obviously address the growing amount of punters that browse via larger screen devices like tablets. More notably, when the <deleted> GUI of Windows 8 was rolled out on MS Surface devices with it's great big icons on a super-wide slider screen, regular websites have dropped the choice of regular or .m and one is stuck with some really hideous pages with huge text, loads of wasted space and huge buttons, obviously for pudgy fingers. A good example is the bbc.co.uk/news website that offered a 'sneak preview' of the new look and once you clicked to try it, that was it, forever. Unless I have missed something, that is now the default and universal viewing format. Another one was SPG hotels group. I went online to grab a room at short notice and this horrible thing in pastel shades of brown appeared, with huge buttons that required scrolling down the length of several pages where it was maybe one and half pages deep before. An earlier convert was PayPal but they (for now) still have an option to select 'classic' view.

I recently worked on a client-provided computer that had Win 7 (cool) but running the latest version of Office 2013. It was bloody awful to look at my excel workbooks and word documents for any length of time and once again, things like the 'Print' option brought up a sparsely populated screen with garish contrasting colours with big icons and huge buttons. I hope it gets universally panned by users and they revert to either the old style or giving us an option. I hear that Win 10 will return the Start button to its rightful place so they must be listening somewhere in Redmond.

Anyone else think that formatting websites for tablets and touch screens has gotten way out of hand?

RichCor Platinum Member

RichCor

Posted
Posted

The latest fad is to have the client browser detect the display resolution and select the appropriate CSS settings for rendering the page/display on the device.

Once upon a time designers cared about how much data was being pushed out to the client. Well, no more. Now, under the technique with the codename 'responsive', everything is pushed out in a universal pile of xml/html/javascript/css and the browser selects the what/where/how/when. Though it's still a nightmare to get it to support the multiple browser platforms/versions.

NeverSure Star Member

NeverSure

Posted
Posted

Oh guys. In the early days, even before Frontpage we opened Notepad and typed our web pages. Paste the following into Notepad, save it as Sample.html and then open it to see a simple word in the default browser - Testing. See Test in the Title Bar. Things have gotten too complicated for me, LOL.

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Test</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY BGCOLOR="FFFFFF">
Testing
</BODY>
</HTML>
IMHO Platinum Member

IMHO

Posted
Posted (edited)

Google recently started penalizing the search rank of websites that are not deemed to be "mobile friendly" - which means either a dedicated 'mobile version' site, or a responsive design site. This policy was announced with very short notice (relatively - from a development POV) and the result has been a massive amount of sites 'upgrading' to responsive design, so as not to disappear from Google searches made on mobile devices.

Responsive design itself is a good concept, but it does commonly have severe shortcomings when implemented as the solo one-size-fits-all solution to making a website scale from old 240x320px mobile devices to tablets, desktops and 1920x1080P HDTV's. Unfortunately, many popular websites are only on their first generation of responsive design, and just haven't got the formula, or performance, right.

Most high traffic websites (>1,000,000 unique visitors) have now crossed the threshold where touch device users outnumber desktop computer users, and that trend will only continue. Don't expect the desktop experience to improve dramatically for most websites - unless they see a decent dip in revenue, they probably won't do much about it.

Edited by IMHO

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