licentious radio

Thursday, January 9, 2003
[10:30:53 PM]

Web browsers should incorporate acceptable bitmap image scaling capabilities.

For example, a 240 pixel-wide image might be two inches for some users, but more than three inches for others. With good scaling, you could tell the browser to display the image as two inches wide, and it would be the same size even where monitors have different settings.

As we've mentioned before, this would allow people with poor eyesight to cheat -- tell their browsers to scale up the size of text and images. For example, if there were actually 96 pixels per inch, a user could tell the browser to act as if there are 150 pixels per inch -- making text and images 50% larger.

Current displays are such low resolution that any measure could wind up being rounded off to the nearest pixel. In the long run, the solution is higher resolution screens. This is likely to take a *long* time, because we are rushing so fast to LCD monitors that have even worse resolution than our CRTs. But five or ten years from now, things should improve....

It's still a good idea to let web browsers scale images well.

[10:04:39 PM]
Big Peace March, Saturday, January 18. Be there! In SF, meet at Market and Embarcadero at 11:00, walk over to the Civic Center for speeches and wildly delicious food. Best to bring your own water, though. (There's a march in DC, too.)

[2:15:13 PM]
Another note on the impossibility of typography for the screen....

In print, we use italics to emphasize. On the screen -- because so few pixels go into each character -- italicized text (at common sizes) is much harder to read that regular text. The illegibility factor actually *de-emphasizes* italicized text. Not what you want.

Then we have the option of making text bold. But at typical sizes, the strokes in a letter are either one pixel wide for regular, or two pixels wide for bold. This is *too* much emphasis. You would only do this if you want to keep people from reading the words that aren't in bold.

What can you do? 1) Write such short chunks of text that none of this matters. Many weblog items are only a paragraph, for example. 2) Give up on writing to be read! Revel in headlines, lists, links, and bold. 3) Cheat. Use color for emphasis. How about dark gray body text and black for emphasis? Lots of problems with this approach -- many people will want to click on differently-colored text. 4) Use slightly larger than normal text, so there are enough pixels to make italics legible.

Fortunately, people *do* read online. The best thing is probably just to avoid using a lot of extra emphasis that would interrupt the text.

[9:21:52 AM]
Smart watches. MS will surely do them badly, but the idea of a read-only display of Palm data that you can strap to your wrist -- that's not bad.

Attention is not the only scarce resource. Hands are also scarce. Try starting up your Pad computer in a hallway holding a cup of coffee and a folder of papers. Compare that with reading the meeting room number off your wristwatch.

There are things you can do better when the device is "always on" -- your wrist. Set an alarm on your Palm, you could walk away and not hear it, for example. And give the watch a vibrate alarm, so you can use it in movie theaters or meetings.