Webmasters Gallery

Some website developers prefer to resize the browser window of the visitors, without their permission, to display their own creativity in terms of flash, presentations and other graphics in either a full screen window or a browser window size that best displays what they have created. These developers either just do not know that it annoys most of the visitors, me included, or may be they never gave it a thought. Its impact on a business is even more, when a designer does something similar with their site or presentation, it ends up annoying the visitor who could also have been a potential customer and drives them away from the site.

If you are a wanna-be web designer, already established or an experienced designer, I put forward a list of reasons which tells you in clear terms that you should not follow this practice, give it a thought and you may agree with me if you think from a visitor’s point of view.

• It’s annoying – You may have never asked people who visit your or your client’s website but you should know that many people don’t like their browser window being resized without their consent.
• Increased screen resolution – Gone are those days when people used to have 640×480 or a maximum of 800×600 screen resolution. Computers have become a lot more cheaper now and that also includes monitor. Screen resolutions have increased and on an average over 90% of computers use anything over 1024×768 pixels resolution.
• It’s not your browser – It’s your visitor’s browser, not yours! Period! If you can not help it and must resize the browser window because you want to show them a very large drawing picture or a design of some mechanical instrument, first display a notice to let them know and only after they click on it you should change the browser window size. Makes sense?
• Resizing everything? – If you rely on a javascript to detect and adjust your site’s content according to screen resolution or size of browser’s window and if a visitor does not has javascript enabled [~5% don’t], you may not be able to do that. It may end up cluttering the layout. Don’t you think so?
• You’ll lose visitors – Visitors don’t like to see their browser window getting resized without any notice, they might end up closing your site and never want to come back again.

JSONView is a new Firefox extension that gives you a nice way to view your JSON documents (JSONovich also does the trick).

Ben Hollis talks about the extension:

The extension itself is pretty simple. I wasn’t sure how to approach the problem of supporting a new content type for Firefox, so I followed the example of the wmlbrowser extension and implemented a custom nsIStreamConverter. What this means is that I created a new component that tells Firefox “I know how to translate documents of type application/json into HTML”. And that it does – parsing the JSON using the new native JSON support in Firefox 3 (for speed and security) and then constructing an HTML document that it passes along the chain. This seems to work pretty well, though there are some problems – some parts of Firefox forget the original type of the document and treat it as HTML, so “View Page Info” reports “text/html” instead of “application/json”, “Save as…” saves the generated HTML, Firebug sees the generated HTML, etc. Just recently I came across the nsIURLContentListener interface, which might offer a better way of implementing JSONView, but I’m honestly not sure – the Mozilla documentation is pretty sparse and it was hard enough to get as far as I did. I’m hoping some Mozilla gurus can give me some pointers now that it’s out in the open.