Browser Display Statistics Published on May 18, 2010
Source: www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp
Statistics are important information. What you can read from the statistics below is that most users are using a display with 1024×768 pixels or more.
W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. This fact indicates that the figures below might not be 100% realistic. The average user might have display screens with a lower resolution.
Anyway, our data, collected from W3Schools’ log-files over almost ten years, clearly shows the long and medium-term trends.
Display Resolution Stats
18/05/2010 – The current trend is that most computers are using a screen size of 1024×768 pixels or more
| Date | Higher | 1024×768 | 800×600 | 640×480 | Unknown |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| January 2010 | 76% | 20% | 1% | 0% | 3% |
| January 2009 | 57% | 36% | 4% | 0% | 3% |
| January 2008 | 38% | 48% | 8% | 0% | 6% |
| January 2007 | 26% | 54% | 14% | 0% | 6% |
| January 2006 | 17% | 57% | 20% | 0% | 6% |
| January 2005 | 12% | 53% | 30% | 0% | 5% |
| January 2004 | 10% | 47% | 37% | 1% | 5% |
| January 2003 | 6% | 40% | 47% | 2% | 5% |
| January 2002 | 6% | 34% | 52% | 3% | 5% |
| January 2001 | 5% | 29% | 55% | 6% | 5% |
| January 2000 | 4% | 25% | 56% | 11% | 4% |
Semantic meaningful names in html elements. Published on March 10, 2010
“When coding a webpage layout, one tends to organize the html elements, naming them by their present location or purpose. Ignoring that, in the future, that organization can make no sense at all.”
Lets say you’re coding a three column layout with a header and a footer. You will use two columns as sidebars and the third as the central to hold the content.
Naturally you would name your columns with some semantic significant names, like “Left Column”, “Central Column”, “Right Column”, “Header” or “Footer. Probably something like that, right?
Ok, fair enough, these “location” names will definitely help you to organize your content trough the layout development. But what will happen if a couple of months later you decide to refresh your layout and move things around?
The flight of the fly… Published on February 22, 2010
“On the early 17th century, in the city of La Haye en Touraine, France, lived a sickly child named René Descartes.
To shore up his health, he was allowed to sleep until 11 o’clock every morning, a habit he maintained throughout his adult life.
During one of these mornings abed, young Descartes watched a fly flit across the ceiling. He realized he could describe the fly’s movements and its location by measuring its distance from two perpendicular walls.
A formalized version of this fly-tracking technique became the Cartesian coordinate system of perpendicular lines and planes, the ubiquitous (x,y) coordinate system that we all well know.”
(read somewhere, some years ago)
Font sizes: EM vs Pixel Published on January 19, 2010
EM was originally defined as the size of the Capital “M” based on the default size and the font used.
Pixel is a solid unit of fixed size, it is not designed for fonts, which are usually defined in Points. Pixel is a measurment that should never be used for text as it is meaningless for text. It is like measuring weight using inches/centimeters.
Syntax vs Semantics Published on December 26, 2009
“Syntax defines the rules that must be followed in order to create a valid document, on the other hand Semantics, define the meaning associated with these syntactical constructions.”
