Logo idea and FreeBSD.com concept

[Johnson David]

From: Devon H. O'Dell [mailto:dodell at offmyserver.com]

> That is done for a reason, at least on my mockup. If you take a look at
> websites of companies that are in the same market (Sun and IBM, for
> instance), their pages do not do this either.

There is a myth among corporations that webpages are supposed to look
absolutely identical on every viewing. It's about their corporate image. If
they thought they could prevent user-side stylesheets, they would. If they
thought they could put up an image of the page and call it "html", they
would. If they could forcibly resize the viewer's screen resolution, they
would.

If you do a complete survey of corporations, though, you will find that not
all follow the above philosophies. But even if they all did, it would not
matter, because we are not a commercial corporation. It doesn't matter to us
if the user is using an unapproved temperature on their monitor, shifting
the colors out of their carefully chosen trademark specifications. We're not
that anal. Or at least we shouldn't be.

> Both their sites look just fine at 1600x1200
> as well.

Irrelevant. The size of the monitor only determines the maximum size of the
windows within it. I don't know anyone who browses in a maximized window on
a 1600x1200 monitor. I'm sure people do, but they would be very rare
individuals. The days of telling the user what size monitor they must have
are long past.

I have a 1600x1200 monitor but my browser windows are 800x1200 so I can put
two of them up on the screen side by side. I can always tell when I get to a
"made for 800x600" page, because suddenly it won't fit and I have horizontal
scrollbars! That's because the few pixels for the window border makes my
view slightly less than 800.

So for me with my very large 21" monitor, I want a page that fits into a 788
width. But that's just me. I'm sure there are tons of folks who prefer even
smaller sizes.

David