A Brief Discussion of Web Design Limitations
 

Michael J. Yacavone

(Written in late 1997. It's not much better today.)

Web page design differs from traditional page layout and printing in several significant ways. There are new limitations, as well as new opportunities, presented by digital media. Following is a discussion of some of the issues.

1. Fonts. Standard fonts on the web are Times Roman, and Ariel/Geneva. We get to use bold and italic, but the italic is virtually unreadable at normal sizes. All other fonts must be created as images. The images create an exact representation of the font, but take longer to load, and require anti-aliasing (see below) due to the low resolution of today's computer screens. Typically, the main ?content? of your page will be in standard web fonts, with your masthead and marketing messages in graphic fonts.

2. Anti-aliasing. Computer screens are low-resolution devices - there are only 72 pixels per inch, as compared to 300 or 600 per inch for a laser printer, and 2400 per inch (or higher) for offset printing. To compensate, the process of anti-aliasing creates fuzzy edges that help the eye perceive the edges without jagged ?stairsteps.? Anti-aliasing is a mixed blessing - it allows the use of very nice fonts, but makes the edges look blurry. All in all it's a reasonable trade-off.

3. Page breaks. There is no absolute page size on the web. Content can scroll on and on an on. Practically, you want to separate pages so that viewers can keep track of where they are and navigate to the next section of interest. Consequently, pages are usually set up by topic, allowing each topic as much space as needed. If the topic is particularly long, it may be broken into sub-topics, and use links to the next and previous pages.

4. Page layout. Page layout is drastically limited on the web. Text and graphics can be set left, center, or right justified - nothing else. Yes, there are many graphic tricks you can play to get pixel-accurate positioning, but many of these tricks break different browsers, and they're not guaranteed to work. There are no tabs on the web. In addition, you cannot have more than one space reliably display (preventing, for instance, using five spaces to simulate a tab).

5. Printing. It's even worse for printing. Pages break wherever they want, right margins get cut off until you reduce the page by 10%, layout is often wrong, and the print quality is limited by the viewer's printer. As of early 1998, this topic is virtually hopeless - people print and they get what they get. Adobe and Microsoft see the problem and are working on solutions. For documents that require formatting, Adobe's Acrobat PDF format works well. You download a file and open it in the free Reader program. PDF retains all the fonts, formatting, page breaks, and color from the original document. A bit slower to use within the web, but very useful for many applications.

6. Color matching. Color matching is a very difficult problem to solve. Every computer has a different monitor, which uses different phosphors to display color. Every monitor has a different graphics card to tell the monitor what to draw. Each operating system describes and displays color differently. Finally, web browsers only reliably understand 216 colors! So, the best we do is pick tone groups, and hope that most people use standard equipment and see a reasonable representation of the colors.

7. Browser differences. Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer together have over 90 percent of the internet browsing market. Ignoring the several dozen other browsers, there are differences between even these two competitors, particularly when it comes to page layout and rendering. Most designers try to avoid the potholes, so this isn't as big a problem as it could be.

8. Operating system differences. While the market share of the Macintosh computer (~12%) appears to be insignificant, realize that the numbers usually reported are for the overall market. Sixty-four percent of all web sites are created on Macintosh, and huge graphic design houses utilize only Macintosh. For instance, the New York Times, Time Magazine, and all of Hearst Communications (Cosmopolitan, Redbook, etc.) are exclusively Mac shops. Why? Windows still hasn't caught up for people who need to move graphics, format pages, specify typography, match colors, and exchange information. For web design, the biggest problem is that Windows displays fonts larger than the Mac (making page layout variable), and the screen color matching is extremely variable. It is common for one Windows computer to look vastly different than another one sitting right next to it. This is an unfortunate side-effect of the lower-cost mix-and-match nature of Windows running on Intel-based computers. The Mac designers compensate as best they can, but picking which Windows machine to standardize on is the root of the problem.

How did it get to be this way? HTML, the language of the web, was designed to specify the sections of a document, such as the heading, the sub-head, the body copy, the navigation links, etc. Once marketeers got involved they wanted color matching, page layout, fonts, etc. We've managed to hack all that so it works, most of the time, for most people. But it will take further evolution of the browsers and the internet standards to get further refinements. We can expect some of these improvements in 1998 and 1999. In addition, Windows users can expect to see better color matching, along with better standardization between machines. Older machines will not gain these benefits, but through normal turnover and technology refreshment most business users can expect a reasonable platform on which to present their web communications.