Plugin to make websites widescreen compatible?

Energize

Energize

Energize

Caporegime
Joined
12 Mar 2004
Posts
29,962
Location
England
Since I got my new widescreen monitor I've noticed how much bad web design there is on many websites, ie pages taking up 1/3 of the screen whereas on ocuk the whole screen is used, is there any kind of firefox plugin that can help format the pages better? To tell the truth even on my old 4:3 monitor some pages still had space wasted, shocking!
 
Doubt it. Think you'd need to be messing around with the site code for width values and stuff. You are probably better off installing the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox, if you use it, and try and edit sites that way? :)
 
I've not heard of such a plugin.

Only way to get around this is for web designers to use 'fluid' layouts, rather than using fixed layouts. i.e. using percentages over pixel/point values.
 
It's not necessarily bad design. The majority of internet users don't have high resolution widescreen monitors. There are worse things than having a lot of white space on a page.

The beauty of a large widescreen, in my opinion, is to be able to see multiple windows at the same time rather than one large window.
 
eXor said:
Have you seen anything as bad as this? :p
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I think that just about takes the biscuit.

theheyes said:
It's not necessarily bad design. The majority of internet users don't have high resolution widescreen monitors.
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Surely though designers should be using scaling frames rather than fixed size ones? At university we were told to do that to prevent problems with people having different resolution and aspect ratio displays.
 
Energize said:
Surely though designers should be using scaling frames rather than fixed size ones? At university we were told to do that to prevent problems with people having different resolution and aspect ratio displays.
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For some sites that is a good solution, the ocuk shop for example. The fluid layout works well, although notice as you increase the size of the window horizontally you only get more white space - not more content. This isn't true for all sites obviously, just an example.

On the other hand a site like the ocuk forums, although it does scale to whatever size you choose, doesn't work so well for a lot of people. This is because reading text from left to right over a large area can be quite tiresome and hard on the eyes.

Obviously there are many exceptions to the rule and this is only basic web design theory. Yes, there are a lot of bad sites out there, but sometimes what you may consider "bad" design is actually a carefully considered compromise.

In regards to widescreen optimized sites, I don't think the outlook is good. With devices like the iPhone and netbooks selling like hotcakes, the drive will be to make pages more accessible to these users rather than those with large screens.
 
Energize said:
I think that just about takes the biscuit.



Surely though designers should be using scaling frames rather than fixed size ones? At university we were told to do that to prevent problems with people having different resolution and aspect ratio displays.
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Fluid layouts don't work with all sites.
 
MarcLister said:
Doubt it. Think you'd need to be messing around with the site code for width values and stuff. You are probably better off installing the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox, if you use it, and try and edit sites that way? :)
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I see you can make your own scripts with it, but can you use it to edit/remove existing scripts on webpages?

suarve said:
Fluid layouts don't work with all sites.
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Wouldn't that itself be because of bad design? :p
 
Energize said:
I see you can make your own scripts with it, but can you use it to edit/remove existing scripts on webpages?



Wouldn't that itself be because of bad design? :p
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Nope, some sites are designed to be a fixed width on purpose.

Its not like it takes much more effort to design a fluid width, its just thats not all sites are designed to be fluid.
 
MarcLister said:
If JavaScript then you could use NoScript or its Mozilla Addons link.

If it isn't Javascript then you should be able to use Adblock manually. Find out the name of the script to block and add that to Adblock. :)
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I have noscript, I know you can block all scripts from a website, but how do you just disable certain ones?

Is there a way to browse websites using custom website code, so you can have your web browser alter pages from a certain website on the fly? I've improved the look of some websites I frequent by altering the html/javascript code, but as far as I can see you would have to do that to every page on the website manually.
 
Energize said:
I have noscript, I know you can block all scripts from a website, but how do you just disable certain ones?
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You can disable individual scripts from a site using NoScript. I was thinking you could use Adblock and add anything that isn't JS to that. :)

Energize said:
Is there a way to browse websites using custom website code, so you can have your web browser alter pages from a certain website on the fly? I've improved the look of some websites I frequent by altering the html/javascript code, but as far as I can see you would have to do that to every page on the website manually.
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How have you done that? Custom CSS? If so, use GreaseMonkey to force your CSS over the site's CSS. :)
 
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