Screen resolution

The pages on this website are mostly written to present without horizontal scroll bars on a 800*600 resolution screen, and graphics are usually sized to display fully. Newer articles are sometimes written to present without horizontal scroll bars on a 1024*768 resolution screen, and graphics are usually sized to display fully.

Although some users are still using 800*600 screens, some articles do not present well within those limitations and have been composed for a higher resolution display (eg 1024*768) in that case. I am sympathetic to users with older equipment, but there comes a time when the benefits of support of legacy standards is far outweighed by exploitation of newer capability... otherwise we would still be composing for 320*200 (CGA) resolution.

In the past, preference has been given to GIF format for line art, but by now most browsers and graphics tools support PNG format, so newer line art graphics will be in PNG format (which has a richer palette).

An example of limiting screen resolution to 800 pixel in width, the WIA home page displays on my workstation with just 20% of the screen area used for the articles list which itself is an object larger than can be displayed within the screen's vertical resolution, and to further detract from usability, is itself scrollable creating a scrollable object within a scrollable window. I am not singling the WIA out here, the presentation is just an example of sites hog tied to older screen resolutions.

If you find cases like that on this site, drop me a line so that I can fix them.