Although it is sometimes more convenient to use other aspect ratios, my default picture is 700x525 pixels. This should fill the screen of the 800x600 display which I had thought was the minimum that anyone with web-access would use. I have found, however, that there are still some of you using 640x480 screens and on these my default picture could never be viewed complete. At the other end of the scale 1280x1024, 1600x1200 and higher-resolution screens reproduce pictures which are rather too small.
Using JavaScript I have developed a scheme which is, I hope, more versatile. It produces full-screen displays for all screen resolutions. For the lower resolutions it attempts to fill the display area. For higher resolutions some expansion of the picture is used together with a background frame. Testing web-pages on all platforms, screen-resolutions and browsers is pretty impossible. I have tested on my own Windows98 system with Internet Explorer 6 and Netscape 4.6 using screen resolutions of 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1152x864, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 but I haven't used other browsers, platforms or operating systems. For browsers without JavaScript, or for which JavaScript has been disabled, display should be in the old form but I have been unable, so far, to check that this works. I would therefore welcome feedback and any suggestion for improvement.
Lawrence C.Hodges email: l_hodges@cix.compulink.co.uk
I have not yet addressed the problem of colour resolution. My own system, my digital camera and scanner use 24-bit colour. Pictures are seriously degraded when viewed in 256 colour mode. 24-bit colour graphics cards are no longer very expensive and I doubt if a second set of files optimised for 256 colour cards is worth creating and maintaining. But I'll look into it.