We're All Alike: We're All Different

Some of us can be told something and, just through hearing it, pick it up. Others have to see it. If you can draw it out on the board, they'll understand what you mean. Still others have to actually do something for it to stick. No amount of lecture or audio-visual presentation will help. They need to sit down and actually try to do something, in order to really learn it. I try to include a little of everything in my training workshops, to catch everyone, because Not Everyone Learns Best In The Same Way. Not everyone wants to hear me go on and on about the elegance of a well-styled web page. Not everyone wants to read the material off of a screen or out of a book. It's good to cast as wide a net as you can, in these matters.

One of the biggest challenges I face every day is remembering that Not Everyone Uses The Web The Way That I Do. You may have run across this in your own Web surfing, if you find yourself visiting familiar sites with a new computer, a laptop, for instance. Laptops frequently have differently-sized screens, and occasionally, slower connections. All of a sudden pages that look fine on the office computer are squished, or the text is so small as to be almost unreadable, or pages that come up quickly seem to be taking forever to load. This kind of exercise is good to put yourself through once in a while, because the odds are very good that there are only a few other people out there with precisely the same combination of computer, monitor, connection speed and Web browser as you are using.

Spare a thought to those who are muddling through with less-than-optimal equipment. They cannot put any more memory into their machine. They cannot upgrade to the newest browsers, they cannot devote three minutes to download a single graphically-rich Web page, and would not be able to appreciate the difference in graphics anyway.

A dozen years ago, things were probably simpler. Pretty much everyone had a thirteen inch or fifteen inch monitor and a 9600bps modem, and we were pretty much all using Netscape Navigator. So we all did pretty much see the same things in the same ways.

But today we can't count on that at all. Have you see how your favorite pages look on the new Apple iPhone? It's a real eye-opener, to many talented Web designers. We can now expect visitors to our Web pages with 30" Cinema displays and 3½" iPhone viewports, too. How can you strike a balance in a world like that? It's not really difficult. Just give a little thought to how a page is likely to be used, and remember to always validate your markup. Well-formed (X)HTML and CSS goes a long way toward keeping the widest range of your users happy.

I hope you have a safe and happy holiday break, and look forward to seeing you in a workshop or at a WebDevNet meeting in the coming year.