Re: UKNM: Standard Banner Sizes

[Ben Thompson]

Tom Hukins wrote:-

>When Web designers create their pages they do not take into consideration

>how they can incorporate a wide variety of advertising into that page. This

>is trivial to do. Create a template for the page and process that template

>according to the advert(s) being displayed every time the page is

>requested. Anyone who really understands HTML and has a rough idea of how

>to use Perl, Visual Basic, TCL, or any other programming language can do

>this easily. As most sites have a house style applied to all pages, such a

>template would only need to be created once, after the site owner has

>determined how flexible the site's advertising policy should be.

>

The real problem is actually the finality of the page. While people are

willing to scroll downwards they are not willing to scroll sideways. There

is a fixed width that has to be adhered to.


While it is perfectly possible to create a banner larger than 468 pixels

most sites have navigation bars on the side that consume 100 or so pixels.

Place the navigation bar by the banner and you are pretty close to the

maximum width of a 640 by 480 monitor. True, most monitors are bigger than

640 by 480 but most people do not browser with full size windows.


The problem is that html is an appaling layout control system. There is no

way of ensuring the layout of a page even with fixed image sizes, so

ensuring the layout of a page when the image sizes are changing is near

enough impossible.


In many ways MHEG (the Digital TV text format) is a more useful format, the

page size may be fixed and each page only contains little information but at

least I know how much space I have to fill, and hence how many lines of text

I can use. The best way to explain the difference is that MHEG is Quark

Xpress to HTML's Pagemaker. Both perform the same job and HTML is easier to

use but MHEG and eventually XML will provide the control Tom has always

wanted.


(Of course American TV will not be using MHEG and Microsoft has only just

discovered Teletext so this is a mute point).


yours,


Ben