Web Design in a Nutshell

Alternative Displays

The Web isn’t just for personal computers anymore! Web browsers are increasingly making their way into our living rooms, briefcases, and cars, in the form of WebTV, handheld PDA devices, and even cellular phones. These extra-small displays introduce new design concerns.

WebTV

WebTV, a device that turns an ordinary television and phone line into a web browser, hit the market in 1996 and is experiencing a slow but steady growth in market share. As of this writing, it is barely a blip on the radar screen of overall browser usage, but because numbers are increasing some developers are taking its special requirements into consideration. Some sites are being developed specifically for WebTV.

WebTV uses a television rather than a monitor as a display device. The live space in the WebTV browser is a scant 544×378 pixels. The browser permits vertical paging down, but not horizontal scrolling, so wider graphics will be partially obscured and inaccessible. Principles for designing legible television graphics apply, such as the use of light text on dark backgrounds rather than vice versa and the avoidance of any elements less than 2 pixels in width.

WebTV publishes a site with guidelines for web developers called Primetime. For more detailed information on the special requirements of WebTV, visit http://www.webtv.net/primetime/.

Hand-Held Devices

The increased popularity and usefulness of the Web combined with the growing reliance on hand-held communications devices such ...