WebTV's Resolution Problem
November 22, 1999
If you're in the computer industry, and have your own computer, you have probably at one time or other seen a product that purports to let you use your large screen television to view your computer. If you were brave enough to actually try out one of these devices, it probably didn't take long for you to realize that things were not quite right. Although, yes, your computer screen was indeed 35 inches across, it just didn't look as good as it does on your little 17 inch monitor.
Without going into a long technical explaination, suffice it to say that a standard television screen uses 640 X 480 resolution. Yup, that means that your beautiful site that was designed on your 800 X 600 resolution monitor will not only be too large to fit on a WebTV screen, but visitors to your site will be unable to scroll to the right to see the rest of your page. And to top it off, a television screen will often show text that is contained within graphics as a blurry, unreadable mess. This is particularly burdinesome in regards to image-based navigation bars and elements that contain text. If a visitor doesn't have a map around your site, they'll be lost!
On a positive note, WebTV makes generous use of the text that is normally displayed in a Web browser's status bar. That text is displayed in an area at the bottom of the WebTV browser (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: WebTV's status bar
You can utilize a JavaScript mouseover effect to help those visitors using WebTV by using their status bar to let them know where those un-readable navigation bar links lead to:
<A HREF="mypages.html"
onmouseover="self.status='Click on
this link to visit my pages.';return true"
onmouseout="self.status='';return true">
<IMG SRC="mypages.jpg" WIDTH="350"
HEIGHT="100" BORDER="0"></A>
Whenever a user moves their mouse over a graphical link, your message is displayed in their status bar. Since the WebTV browser's status bar displays the text using a large and prominent font, the user will finally be able to browse through your site without feeling like they have blinders on.
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