HTML Coding
WebTV
By Laura Lemay
Here's a fun experiment to try if you're bored on a Sunday afternoon. Use your favorite browser to view a Web page you've designed, one you're particularly proud of. Now shrink the browser window so that your page is only about seven inches wide by five inches high. Finally, set your default font to a sans-serif font such as Helvetica or Arial, in 18 points.
How do your pages look with those settings? Do they reformat kind of oddly, but are they still mostly usable? Do you lose half the page off the right side of the screen? Do you end up with text columns a single word wide, or worse, overlapping images and text? Did you wail in horror at the mess your page had become and rush to set everything back in place?
So what's my point in performing this strange experiment? Why bother using these weird settings when everyone uses 12 point Times Roman and a normal screen size?
These settings approximate the appearance of your pages as viewed by WebTV — that little $300 box that lets you surf the Web from the couch via your television set; see
Figure 1. Because resolution on the average TV set is much poorer than that of a computer monitor, the font sizes have to be large to be readable, making the screen size proportionally smaller. So viewing your browser with a small screen and large fonts gives you a general idea of how people will see your pages on WebTV. (You'd get a better idea, of course, by mooching off a friend who has one or by visiting your local consumer-electronics emporium and checking it out for yourself.)
