internet tablet website?
 

What would you like to see in a website optmized for the IT's?. Are there any good ones out there?

Re: internet tablet website?
 

the content portion of the display must be under 800px and reflow properly @ 120% or at least provide a reasonable font size for the content area which is readable to us 40-something's who have been staring at CRTs & LCD for over 30-years... :) I could care less if the ads or menus are outside that area, but the content needs to fit the display, assuming a three-column layout, so this constant panning left and right can stop...it's ******ed. I can flip over to menu's when I need them...it's the content I am after. And this does not affect display on regular PC's in any fashion.

Seriously that is my biggest issue with almost every site dedicated the NIT's they seem to have zero clue that it might be nice if they developed their sites so they actually work well on a tablet display.

All that needs done is to detect the details from the browser and use a style sheet for that platform & browser. Not like it's not an unknown factor.

Re: internet tablet website?
 

Maximize use of space. Useless huge pictures at the top, like on this site, are a major PITA. They take up an entire page for nothing. Pictures, especially large ones, are more trouble than they will ever be worth. Make sure the page reflows at any resolution or zoom. Keep the ads unobtrusive. I realize they're inevitable, but I hate them anyway, and if they get in the way of browsing, I'll just go elsewhere.

Re: internet tablet website?
 

http://www.jablet.net

;)

Re: internet tablet website?
 

I've often wondered why "Thanks" and "Quote" look so huge on www.internettablettalk.com. Does anyone else have this problem?

Re: internet tablet website?
 

Yes, or, failing that, be like this site (or, I presume, any vBulletin), and use sane CSS so it can be overridden with local CSS. itT is quite tablet- and even finger-friendly, when CSSed up right. Of course, it's anyones guess why that's not provided in the CSS switcher, instead of hack your own, but it works anyway.

Reflowing text is not such a big deal, imho, just have your font sane to start with. I have no difficulty reading almost any site; it's navigating that gets rough, and that can be fixed in CSS if the site was designed sanely to start with.

(Anyone trying to make local CSS should try desktop Opera and its "Developer Console" for editing CSS on-the-fly.)

Re: internet tablet website?
 

Without a screenshot, it's hard to know what "so huge" is, but it sounds like you may have "Fit width to view" on. It trashes images.

Re: internet tablet website?
 

http://nytimesriver.com/

One of my favorite bookmarks on the n810. Thank you Dave Winer.

Re: internet tablet website?
 

This website, while not specifically made for what you are talking about does have potential to replace some of my internet browswing

http://feedjournal.com/index.html

it allows you to put in your rss feeds, and it will download them and put them in newspaper format in pdf. So it is much easier to read on the built in pdf reader.

I havent really given it a full go in my nokia n800, but it seems to work fine on my computer so far.

Re: internet tablet website?
 

Thanks, "Fit width to view" was my problem. And sorry I did not include screenshots, I still need to figure out how to do those.

Re: internet tablet website?
 

One shouldn't have to do CSS tricks to view a site properly. It should be set up right in the first place, especially if it's marketed to ITTs. This site is ok, barely, with the classic view. The others the owner has chosen are simply not useable. White on black is a really bad idea, and the white carries over even on the classic view, making highlighted text invisible, being white on almost white.

Re: internet tablet website?
 

It depends on how you define "tricks".

I'm an old HTML guy, but after looking into the subject a few months ago, I quickly learned that CSS is THE way to go, period, especially with regards to the tablets. IMO, use of css is the only thing that makes sense to properly construct and view pages on small screens. It also makes it easy for them to render decently on many sizes at once, including large screens.

Re: internet tablet website?
 

I took the comment to mean the USER should not have to do create a custom CSS to override the setup of the site in order to make the site viewable on the NIT.

Basically that is true for ANY website....they user should not have to make any changes other than possible increase oe decrease the font size for their personal viewing/vision needs. But using properly formatted HTML pages will reflow with a font change w/o significantly altering the overall look of the site or, one of the most common probs is the text should not extend beyond the div container.

Anyway, that is how I read the comment.

Re: internet tablet website?
 

Ah! You may be right, breck.

But anyway, if the original design CSS is done properly, the user should not HAVE to do anything. ;)

Re: internet tablet website?
 

I disagree regarding light-on-dark vs. dark-on-light, but let's not start that flamewar. Certainly whichever way it works out, it should be consistent. One or two lines of CSS resolves that problem with the classic theme; there's no reason why that CSS shouldn't have been added already. That's a bug in the implementation, but the great thing is that the design is right, so that it can be fixed by CSS.

While I agree that sites should not be broken (white-on-white is broken, no doubts on that!), they shouldn't necessarily be very suitable for internet tablet usage as they stand. (Remaining aware that the topic of this thread is good sites, I'm speaking more generally about all sites.) It would be nice for compassionate webmasters to add CSSs for us, but as our needs are different from "ordinary" browsers, it seems only natural that, until internet tablets become more commonplace, we'll have to make some efforts on our own to get a really comfortable experience.

But if you design content and structure in HTML, and presentation in CSS, it can always be fixed easily for other browsers, either by end-users or by the webmasters.

Re: internet tablet website?
 

OK...back to the original subject matter, here is a content portal I use on my Archos 605wifi. It is intended for use on the Archos, but so far I have found it to work quite well on my n810.

http://www.darksouls.org/

It has links to streaming TV, video and radio. There are links to flash games and apps and links to other sites that are good for viewing on mobile devices. Check it out.

Re: internet tablet website?
 

Hmmm... you have me thinking now, ynnek63.

Jay and I have been wondering what to do with the whole jablet project now that parts of it are becoming moot. I wonder if what we should do is develop a "tablet-friendly certification program" and host it on jablet.net. Would anyone see value in that?

Re: internet tablet website?
 

It'd give us something to flame you about, on the basis of which sites did/didn't get certified, I guess.

I tend to just use the tablet for the same sites I'd go to anyhow, and grumble to myself about ones that aren't friendly and I don't use much, and fix the ones that I do use much.

Re: internet tablet website?
 

I'm thinking of the future though. Something that could drive some current sites to become tablet-friendly. Some aren't because it's too new, some because it won't suit their site, some because of the work, and some because they don't know any better. The latter are who I'd mainly go for.

I cobbled up a rough idea of ratings. It would take 1 star minimum to be certified a Tablet-Friendly Website:

* 800x480 design, some 2-way scrolling allowed on secondary pages, no CSS required

** 800x480 design, some 1-way scrolling allowed on any secondary page, some CSS

*** 800x480 design, 1-way scrolling allowed only on list-style pages, some CSS, no javascript

**** 800x480 design, 1-way scrolling allowed only on list-style pages, full CSS compatible with all browsers, no javascript, scalable to desktop monitors with no problems

There would be cool logos as well, of course.

feedback? Other than Benson's that is. :p

Re: internet tablet website?
 

The link to the content portal I posted is not officially supported by Archos. The official Archos content portal sucks! The link I posted is an independent project started because of the crappy content portal on the Archos device. The sites within the link I posted are just sites that people have found that work well with the Archos. Since the 605wifi and the n8x0 have similar screen sizes and resolutions I figured that portal would work well for the NITs. I think it would be great to have a similar portal for the N8x0, but i am clueless when it comes to such matters as web site design and set-up.

Re: internet tablet website?
 

I like the way this is going...a lot. My biggest gripe is a need to scroll horizontally to read the content. That part needs to fit inside 800px width with a font around either 120% or 150%. Then the left and right columns typically used for site navigation as well as ads and other ancillary content can be examined when needed. And this even works outside the common 3-column layout design. Meaning a site can have multi-columns for content but hopefully this more newspaper style layout is going to fade from use as computer displays simply are not geared to reading in columns when those columns extend below "the fold" so to speak...

And to make this work sites will absolutely have to make use of properly implements CSS and server side processing based on MIME type and other header info that a browser sends along with the request. It all does add a layer of complexity that many site owners will view as not significant enough to design with these requirements in mind. Sort of like how many sites feel that leaving Mac users to fend for themselves makes sense from a business standpoint because the overhead to design and support what might amount to less that 2-3% of visitors to their particular site is not cost effective.

Still if site owners and developers would focus more on common sense and standards then trying to be too cute and tricky in their coding, internet use would be a far more pleasant thing...

I for one really dislike Flash for easily over 90% of the sites I might visit. A few need it and use it well, but most simply gobble my bandwidth with some pointless intro page that eventually just offers a link into the site...or they use it to push video ads that most users don't know how to block because the are not willing to disable Flash until they visit a site where it matters.

Anyway, this looks super promising and I do love the concept of a NIT site design standards. Especially for sites geared toward NIT's and smaller mobile devices. I mean geeze, if you have a site targeted toward a specific hardware platform, it's not unreasonable to expect that it function correctly on that platform? Yes? No?

BTW, for the most part this site is fine until I am need to increase the magnification on the site to 150%.

You know a lot of this goes away if the browser itself allowed font resizing. Page magnification is not the same thing. Font resizing changes only the font size whereas the magnification explodes the whole page. If the site is setup correctly it will elegantly manage re-sized fonts on the user end and re-flow with a changed in font size w/o affecting layout beyond making the page longer or shorter depending on the direction a font is re-sized. Or does the OS2008 offer a way to alter font size and I just have missed it?

Re: internet tablet website?
 

Most users have no idea what CSS is, or that it even exists. They shouldn't have to know. That's the job of the web designer. I do agree that most sites have no obligation to be tablet-friendly, but sites that claim to be tablet-specific certainly do. I also agree about the #*&%$ flash. I just disable it on my machines, and don't deal with it. It's the most worthless crap ever invented. It can be useful for a few specific applications, but indiscriminate use of flash just because it's flashy really turns me off. In almost any kind of design, simple is better. I don't visit forums to look at pictures, moving or not, and I prefer there aren't any, other than what might be posted to make things clearer in a thread. But that's just me, and maybe it's a character flaw. If so, I'll just keep on being flawed.

Re: internet tablet website?
 

interesting you mention moving images on a page. Actually there have been studies after studies that show animated ads, ,logo, what not all will actually distract users and they spend less time on pages with any sort of animation that is not germane to the intent of the site.

But, yup, in my mind Flash is a great tool...but it needs to be used with restraint. And I think designers need to rethink their user of it as we move to more and more mobile computing.

same goes for those sites with embeded video that loads whether you want it to or not.

Re: internet tablet website?
 

btw, if ya wanna look at over engineered pages take a look at the soruce on pages over at eBay....some of them load over 200k of SCRIPTS....I mean gimme a break!

Re: internet tablet website?
 

You're certainly right about ebay, breck, and same goes for amazon... as well as many news sites.

Personally I prefer a drill-down approach over those "let's throw everything we can at the user on one page" tactics. It's cleaner, more functional, and faster. The tablets have exposed the ugliness of many sites-- being required to wait for 200+ objects of any kind to load before the web page fully renders is just flat insane.

I'd wager that 90% of what's shoved on us via main web pages is immaterial to what we're looking for. It's definitely more distracting than useful.

I really regret not having the time to put into jablet.net like I'd wanted, but I'm not giving up completely. It may be Summer before I get back to it (when I don't have to spend every single night coaxing 2 boys through mounds of homework) but I intend to. Jabber was just one aspect of the site; I mean for it to be a general tablet resource as well. The tablet-friendly standards thing just popped into my head today thanks to this thread and I really want to get to work on it!

Re: internet tablet website?
 

Just came up with 2 more criteria to add to certification levels:

-finger-friendliness

-home page load speed

D'oh! How could I have forgotten those??? :o

Re: internet tablet website?
 

Yes! Sometimes the thanks is so huge it fills up the
whole screen.

Re: internet tablet website?
 

Good news (I didn't know where else to put this): MICROSOFT HAS GIVEN IN TO INTERNET STANDARDS!

That's right, they officially announced that IE8 will reverse years of proprietary terror (and its own original intent) by defaulting to OPEN web standards.

Imagine fully-functional css across the internet. No more custom-coding for Microsoft's insanity.

Oh, the joy.

http://visualstudiomagazine.com/blog...aspx?blog=1985

(This post is also a reminder to myself that I promised to get back on the stick this summer with jablet.net...)