Web Design in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Alternative Displays

The Web isn’t just for personal computers anymore! Web browsers are increasingly making their way into our living rooms, briefcases, and cars, in the form of WebTV, handheld PDA devices, cellular phones, and dashboard devices. These extra-small displays introduce new design concerns.

WebTV

WebTV, a device that turns an ordinary television and phone line into a web browser, hit the market in 1996 and is experiencing a slow but steady growth in market share. As of this writing, it is barely a blip on the radar screen of overall browser usage, but because numbers are increasing, some developers are taking its special requirements into consideration. Some sites are being developed specifically for WebTV.

WebTV uses a television rather than a monitor as a display device. The live space in the WebTV browser is a scant 544 × 378 pixels. The browser permits vertical paging down, but not horizontal scrolling, so wider graphics are partially obscured and inaccessible, or resized to fit. Principles for designing legible television graphics apply, such as the use of light text on dark backgrounds rather than vice versa and the avoidance of any elements less than 2 pixels in width. These and other guidelines are provided on WebTV’s special developer site at http://developer.webtv.net.

Of particular interest is WebTV Viewer, which shows you how your web page will look on WebTV, right from the comfort of your computer. It is available for free for both Windows and Mac (although ...