(Shelly Cashman Series) Gary B. Shelly, H. Albert Napier, Ollie N. Rivers-Web design_ introductory concepts and techniques -Cengage Learning (2008)

56 Chapter 2 Web Publishing Fundamentals
Web page in
browser with images
turned on
Web page in browser
with images turned
off displaying
alternative text
Figure 2-13 Alternative text descriptions replace turned-off images.
DESIGN
TIP
Web pages might display quite differently when viewed with different browsers
and browser versions. For this reason, test your Web pages with different
browsers and browser versions before publishing your site.
MONITOR RESOLUTION A Web page also will display differently depending on the
resolution setting of the user’s monitor. Resolution is the measure of a monitor’s sharpness
and clarity, related directly to the number of pixels it can display. A pixel, short for
picture element, is a single point in an electronic image. The pixels on a monitor are so
close together that they appear connected. Resolution is expressed as two numbers — the
number of columns of pixels and the number of rows of pixels that a monitor can display
— and represents the total number of pixels displayed on a monitor’s screen.
At higher resolutions, the number of pixels increases while their size decreases. Page
elements appear large at low resolutions and decrease in size as resolution settings increase.
Typical modern monitor resolutions range from 800 600 pixels to 1280 1024 pixels. For
some time, the recommended practice has been to design Web pages for the most commonly
used resolution, which, today, is the 1024 768 resolution. If you design Web pages to be
viewed at the 1024 768 resolution, a visitor viewing the Web page at a higher resolution
will see a blank area on one or both sides of the page. However, a visitor viewing the page at
the lower 800 600 resolution is forced to scroll the page horizontally to see all its content.
Scrolling a Web page horizontally hampers readability and is likely to frustrate visitors.