brianthedrummer wrote:

Screen sizes: we're using a fixed layout as provided by Blueprint which uses floats. I think it's fine and flexible to develop with. It is not perfect, but not bad either. In the US here, 800x600 is very very rare; 1024x768 is by far the most common screen res and in 2nd place are screens 1280x1024 and higher. 800x600 makes up a very small fragment of users. These stats have held true on a variety of sites I have worked on, large and small. I dont know the situation in europe etc.

Blueprint, by the way, is set to about 960px wide I think (we'll need to break this in a few places probably). If you have a huge screen, the site will center itself and not go wider than that. If somebody wants to offer a CSS to "correct" the site for 800x600, I see that as something the community should offer later.

And of course, skinning will be available - as little or as much as you want. I will be isolating all typography, color, layout, and question-library code into separate sheets with the largest sheet being one called main.css which holds all of the rest of the page-styles etc. If you just wanted to do something like a high-contrast color version, or change all the typography, this could be done site-wide in minutes with minimal QA.


Hello Brian,
what you wrote sounds really great. The new design seems to be well structured and elaborate.

Just a few numbers concerning the screen resolution which mostly fit your observations. In Europe the following screen resolutions are used:
640 x 480 = 0,5%
800 x 600 = 17%
1024 x 768 = 60%
1280 x 1024 = 18%
> 1280 x 1024 = 5%

There is an extension called "AIS Web Accessability Toolbar" which helps developers to regards accessibility issues. This tool can change the resolution, turn CSS on/off, show table structures... It can be downloaded at www.visionaustralia.org.au/info.aspx?page=1569
Maybe this tool might be helpful?!

I didn't meet my collegeue to ask him if he has contact to some screenreader users. I will report back when I have talked to him.

Best regards,
Mazi

I didn't meet my collegeue to ask him if he has contact to some screenreader users. I will report back when I have talked to him.

Just as a short feedback: I couldn't yet establish contact with people who are using screenreaders beacuse of a certain handicap. But I have a colleague who is testing our applications with a screenreader so she is fimiliar with this issue.

If you have any questions I can forward them to her. When the first alpha of LS2.0 is released I could ask her to test it and give us some feedback.

Greetings from Germay,
Mazi

Great feedback here in the report. Whats the diff between Public private and commercial? those terms dont seem to be mutually exclusive to me.

in regards to the questions here: where did the stats about screen res "in europe " come from? If 800x600 is that high, we may need to consider that int he core css.

I am familiar with that toolbar but i use the Web Developer extension in firefox which already does that (note that table structures wont be present except in data tables

brianthedrummer wrote:
where did the stats about screen res "in europe " come from? If 800x600 is that high, we may need to consider that int he core css.
Well, the first explanation is that people in Europe are too poor to buy bigger screens
A serious explanation is that these stats aren't "up to date". I think we can disregard the 800x600 resolution.

(note that table structures wont be present except in data tables
That's the way a good application should be designed. You know your work

Best regards,
Mazi

Maybe you all need to move places with lower tax rates

I appreciate the careful thought going into the development of future LimeSurveys.

The prevalence of 800x600 screen resolution seems to be around 7 - 8%. Can one afford to inconvenience 1 in every 12 potential survey takers?

Of course the actual useful browser window size is potentially quite a bit smaller than the nominal screen resolution. Ideally I would hope that the layout would be flexible enough that the minimum window width only begins to matter when it becomes smaller than the width essential for the widest question type. If my ideal of flexibility is impossible, at least devising the survey layout for 800x600 would allow comfortable use at the most common resolution.

I don't know if it's just the convenience of using the blueprint template or functional necessity that sets the 960px minimum width, but it requires a dedicated, maximised browser window on minimum 1024x768 screen. It won't allow frames for survey-hosting sites or applications. For example, I would want to provide surveys on the institution's web sites, leaving the default navigation bars, logos, etc. intact - and I'm sure that's a very common approach. I doubt the Joomla integration that some people have been working so hard on would work too well either. And users would have to close any browser side panels. Or have I misunderstood, and provision is made in the 960px for such things?

Regards.

Hi

Given the scope of our work , we've decided to design for a min res of 1024. BluePrint CSS framework actually uses a 960px (i think) area for the page, a 24-unit grid system (40px wide columns). 800x600 is fine for the question area but it is not wide enough to accomModate the entire interface needs of LS.

If a designer want's to work on a 800x600 wide layout, they should be able to do this fairly easily with adjustments to one CSS file (or even just adding an additional css file and overriding the blueprint layout file). In addition, for most surveys, the only part that will be cut off is the column of tips/help stuff (per question) that appear to the right of the form questions. the questions (form elements) themselves should fit in 800x600 area (note the tips are not actually in a real css column - they are inside the fieldset/div for each question so they serialize properly but visually, they appear to be in a column).

Many surveys wont even have help boxes anyways. Screen sizes are only getting bigger and 800x600 is rare. Mobile devices are the exception but those require a different approach on a number of levels beyond just the column layouts. We hope to get to that in the future as well.

Please send data on the Joomla integration; that is news to me. Right now, the surveys we are designing are also not exportable (e.g. you cant just drop a script tag onto an external website off the LS install domain and take the survey). But thats on the roadmap.

THis is how I understand all of this to date; Juhan may have other comments.

B

Hi,

Sorry about the long delay. I was reminded of this discussion when I encountered the Blueprint Grid CSS Generator, a tool which allows one to customise the number of columns and column, margin, and page widths of the default Blueprint framework. But perhaps you're already aware of it?

I haven't used Joomla, but the Limesurvey extension for it, JooSurvey, was discussed in the fora. mainly here and a few other mentions. It's apparently based on an older LimeSurvey version and it's not clear to me whether the developer will continue with it.

Regards.

I think we should try to contact the joosurvey developer(s) and ask them if they want to join the LS2.0 dev team. It would be great to have a joomla extension based on LS2.0. Joomla is very widespread and by doing so we could extends the LS community.