 Website
design has unarguably become a major source of headache for designers
because of the widely varying non-standard standards for both desktop
and mobile device displays. Compound that with the massive amount of
information which needs to be fitted into the available space and the
task is daunting. RF Cafe screen space has been necessarily (some say
annoyingly) crammed with content. Some of the "clutter" has been necessitated
by the need to make a living (i.e., advertising), but the majority is
driven by a desire to provide as much data as possible without the need
to endlessly scroll up and down pages and, most importantly, not having
to click all around the website to find what you're looking for.
One thing I implemented a long time ago was a unique (my original
idea) menu system that avoids an HTML file that contains hundreds of
lines of drop-down menu code, on top of the actual web page content.
I use multiple separate, categorized, selectable pages in an iFrame
(inline frame). It is fast, compact, and never causes obnoxious behavior
like menus that refuse to open or close or that obscure underlying content
on the page.
 But,
I digress... In an effort to produce a "mobile" option for RF Cafe,
I began researching mobile device screen sizes. As expected, there is
no standard, so it is up to the web page designer to either pick a screen
size and work with it, or try to be all things to all devices and use
complex JavaScript code to detect the device resolution and format the
page dynamically, accordingly. In the process of learning about iPhone
and other smartphone pixel counts, I ran across a handy-dandy website
that generates a horizontal and vertical grid (left) to allow you to
easily determine the pixel width and height, respectively, of your device
display. It can also be used to manually adjust the size of your browser
to match various device resolutions to see what your web page will look
like within the space. WebsiteDimensions.com also provides some
useful info on common screen sizes for various generations of desktops,
tablets, and smartphones based on statistics gathered at the
W3C website. This page on Wikipedia has a very extensive
list of
display sizes on a per manufacturer basis.
Posted January 27, 2014
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