Hyatt on the High-Res Web

Check out Dave Hyatt’s excellent write-up on designing and rendering Web pages so they take advantage of the higher-resolution screens that may be coming our way. I emphasize “may” because I’ve seen how slowly we’ve picked up pixels over the years. The first really substantial screen I ever worked on was a 1988-vintage Sun workstation with about a million pixels. The Mac on my lap right now, which has 125 times as much memory as that workstation, has only 1.38 million pixels. Anyhow, Hyatt has some smart things to say on the issues, which are trickier than you might think. I suspect that sometime in a couple of years, if I still care about ongoing, I’m going to have to go back and reprocess all the images so that higher-res versions are available for those who have the screens and don’t mind downloading bigger files. Anyhow, Dave’s piece may be slightly misleading in that he talks about SVG as though it’s something coming in the future. Not so, check out this nifty SVG Atom logo, which works fine in all the Mozilla browsers I have here. Load it up, resize the window, and watch what happens. Then do a “view source”. [Update: Jeff Schiller writes to tell me that Opera 9 does SVG (and Opera 8 “SVG Tiny”) too.] [Dave Walker writes: Though the shipping version of Safari doesn’t support SVG, the nightlies do.] [Dave Lemen points to JPEG 2000 as possibly useful in a high-res context.]