I'm thinking about something. My last hand at creating webpages was wrought with neverending frustrations on how to make it scalable to various browsers, etc. Eventually I got something decent. Then later I discovered something. I increased my screen resolution, and so that the text wouldn't appear really tiny, I decided to make windows fonts 150% bigger than normal. Now when I look at my webpage the text is cut off early, and dropped to the next line, making the paragraphs look ugly.

One thing I noticed about images is that you can actually scale them. I don't know if all browsers can do this, or do it well, but for the most part scaling works, and is basically not as dependant on browsers and os settings, as html text is. So I was thinking, maybe I could make an all graphics webpage? I don't mean no text, I mean text paragraphs would be graphics as well. If I did this, and if I started with the lowest res possible (640x480) and built the page to fit on it, i could scale the graphics up, so no matter what res, you could actually look at the page as I intended it. Plus with those small graphics and scaling, it would be okay for 56k modem users to view my pages.

Now granted, those with text browsers, or anyone who manages to turn off their graphics, couldn't use the webpage, but then this could actually be a seperate text-only version.

So what do you guys think, yes, no, maybe, "you're nuts"?

Keith

Definetely not 100% images.
Definetely not separate version.

Take a look at how others do their websites:
- www.retro64.com is very good example of neat site which uses images & text nicely
- www.humap.com uses a bit more images to create nice looks
- www.morphlings.com is of course the best example what you can find from the web ;)

Don't think about scaling or different versions too much. Learn a bit how others do it and try to create something original but using the same methods.

Another problem with going 100% images is that you'll rank extremely low on search engines since your page will pretty much be devoid of any relevant text and headings.

The scaling built in to browsers is quick, but awful. There is no kind of filtering (such as bicubic) performed, so an image scaled up from 640 X 480 to 1024 X 768, for example, would look blocky and any text would be difficult to read.

IE does have some proprietary filters that are of higher quality, and there is talk of similar facilities for future versions of other browsers, but cross browser image scaling will be of low quality for the forseeable future, AFAIK. It is still somewhat processor intensive to scale all but small images with high quality and it can really bog down the process of rendering an html page with many images or with large images.

CSS and a good eye for acceptable compromises, along with extensive testing, are currently the best way to go to design sites for modern browsers, IMO. Don't even get me started on designing for old browsers like Netscape 4.x. Bleh.

Since you asked, put me down for "you're nuts"

I agree that going with only images is a bad idea. Your search engine status will probably tank, since you'll have no words on the site at all! It will also chew more bandwidth, since images are always bigger than plain text.

If you want to have control over the appearance, have you considered using Flash? I haven't used it myself, but I've seen many sites done entirely in Flash. I personally don't like this, but I think that the crowd is used to this by now.

Considering text scaling, that's a problem not only when creating web pages but also when you're using system fonts in your games. It's utterly annoying. How are you supposed to design things when you don't even know how big the font will be? Hopefully most people will have the default text size, and the ones that don't will be used to things being messed up...

Okay search engine status will = bad. no filtering for scaling - understand.

A weird thing about this, the dexterity site uses fonts correctly, that is, it didn't seem to effect much with my font size being larger, other than the left margin widening to allow for larger text, however, I notice that the tabs at the top of the page, are now very tiny. It makes me wonder how people in 1280x1024 cope with that. For them it should be really really tiny. Sure you can have a bigger monitor, but it's got to be pretty big to see that tiny stuff.

The other thing I would like to try, is to get rid of all scrolling. While alot of us are use to scroll bars, some people aren't. And in fact in some cases you don't realize you can scroll even when you're used to scroll bars (in some cases BECAUSE you're used to scrollbars). My thought is, you have enough info for one screen's worth of information, and if they want more info, they can click. This way they can see your whole web page only if they want to and not if they accidently miss the info under the window.

The only problem with single screens is you have to build it for the smallest resolution, so that smaller resolutions don't force scroll bars to appear. I'll probably forgo 640x480 (smallest) for 800x600.

As far as search engines are concerned, I suppose it wouldn't be so bad if decent ALT descriptions were provided.

However I would really hate such a page. Long loading time, impossible to set the background color like I want, either too small or too big, and I'd need to click a button to load the pictures since I'm otherwise browsing with pictures disabled ;-). This is of course only my POV; maybe such a site could be successful.

Like it's been said, I think you'd rather have a look at other's web site (indie sites). Some are very nice and yet use only a few graphics. I like www.squashysoftware.com (it's actually one of the very few web sites that looks better with pictures than without IMHO, BTW).

Forget going image-only, go sound only, then you really won't have to work about browser resolution!

The loading time wouldn't be that much of an issue, if I did what i wanted and used a low resolution... but like someone mentioned, no filtering, so possibly it would look pretty blocky, but then again, you could probably make it look good... Depending on the style you're going for. Anyways even if I don't put the text into images, i'm still probably going to scale the graphics, starting with a low res.

640x480 still doesn't look bad, there's still alot of games that use that resolution. So scaling it up, although looking blocky, still wouldn't look that blocky.

Like BitBoy said, you could do your entire site in Macromedia Flash if it doesn't matter to you that your site will not exist in any meaningful way in search engines. It would scale without any problem and if done correctly could be a smaller download than all the bitmap graphics you are considering. Many artists and designers do this to better control presentation of their sites.

That being said, I think you're nuts. ;)

-Tom

Originally posted by Uhfgood

A weird thing about this, the dexterity site uses fonts correctly, that is, it didn't seem to effect much with my font size being larger, other than the left margin widening to allow for larger text, however, I notice that the tabs at the top of the page, are now very tiny. It makes me wonder how people in 1280x1024 cope with that. For them it should be really really tiny. Sure you can have a bigger monitor, but it's got to be pretty big to see that tiny stuff.


Whaat? Tiny? I'm browsing web on 1920 x 1440 and those aren't too tiny for me ;)

=> of course it depends not only about monitor but also on how big screen you got....

In general I would say it's a bad idea, terrible even, but I'm guilty of doing this on one site.

http://www.lizardsoft.com is almost entirely images, but I was aiming more for a visual look than information, since the site is basically just a gateway to other sites.

If you are looking for search engine ranking, fast load speed, flexibility, user-friendliness (imagine not being able to highlight any text on the site), you should go with normal HTML or if at the very least Flash (although personally I greatly dislike Flash sites).

I dislike flash as well, but css is a major pain in the butt. Oh well, it was just a thought, and I usually go with majority rules, so I guess i won't be doing that. I will still be using a low res and scaling up though. (at least where i can).

Keith

Flash sites are a pain, mainly because it is impossible to copy/bookmark a specific page, impossible to copy text, impossible to set colors, there's possibly some annoying sound/music that can't(?) be stopped, and they're usually not so fast to load in my experience.