Dynamic cropping is a bad idea
In a recent article on A List Apart, Marc van den Dobbelsteen showed a technique for creating dynamic layouts for specific screen sizes. This would allow us to create pages which could be displayed on a multitude of devices, including older computers and PDAs.
Unfortunately, this is one of those cases of "Just because we can do it, doesn’t mean we should." The implication of dynamically cropping photos is a little frightening, especially since the example used in the article is for a news site. Cropping a photo which leaves out important information is unethical journalism.
If you look at nytimes.com, you’ll see their article photos appear in many different sizes, depending on the photo. Wider photos run across the top of the article, while more narrow photos are placed down the left side of the article. It still affords the photojournalists many options on how to present the photos on the web, while keeping the article layout pretty standard across every article.
I fear that not thinking about each scenario and trying to make an all-in-one website offering, will lead to more than a few problems. Making things automated and doing everything dynamically is always attractive because it reduces time and therefore cost. However, it can often lead to carelessness and mistakes when not as much individual attention is given to everything that gets published.
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In a recent article on A List Apart, Marc van den Dobbelsteen showed a technique for creating dynamic layouts for specific screen sizes. This would allow us to create pages […]
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oh my god i love you. was that for me?
Testing his method IE 6, at just under 1024px width, I was still getting the 320px version of the article. I’m not even sure his solution is all that great. If you want to support PDAs, offer a text-based style sheet. Statistics show that covering your bases on 800 and 1024px width screens will get you at least 94% of Internet traffic. The other 6% is “unknown” which is probably PDAs. Let’s get real. If you’re getting news on your PDA, you probably subscribed to a feed. And if you didn’t, why do you own a PDA? To look cool? Get off my website.
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