limitations

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We have covered enough of HTML 3.2 to create very useful web pages. To give an example, the information you have received so far, is all that was needed to create these very pages (with one small exception). But before you "go out there and be fruitful", there are some matters that need to be discussed. As you might have noticed while surfing the web, there are some important limitations to what can be put on a web page. Keeping these limitations in mind may save you from problems that may prevent others from viewing your pages.

speed

One aspect that anyone will have noticed the first time on the web, is that it may take time to load larger files. It may sometimes even be entirely impossible to view a page, just because a browser times out when it doesn't get information. The unfortunate consequence for you as the writer of a page is that people will not see it, maybe just because they punch out before the entire page is loaded.

The seriousness of this problem also depends on your target audience. Commercial or academic locations typically have faster connections than home users. The only way of limiting the consequences to the minimum, is to try and keep the sizes of your pages to the minimum. Text is smaller than an image, images can be reduced in color depth, or size, or quality. It is considered good practise to provide a description or preview of a large resource, with a link to the actual resource, possibly accompanied by the file size. This allows the viewer to decide whether to download or not, or even to come back when the web is less crowded.

Modern browsers will cache (store in memory) images you put on your pages, so repetitive use of the same (small) images will not lead to additional download time.

platform

An aspect that is becoming less important with the arrival of new, low budget, high performance computers is the actual speed of the system on which the pages are viewed. Displaying very complex pages, with a lot of images, tables, and other alignment tags takes a lot from the system. Again, this affects the commercial and academic audiences less than home users. One might even argue that any system that can run Windows 95 even half-decent should have no problems displaying complex web pages. However, PC's running low on system resources will definately be slower than less occupied systems. Nevertheless, I consider this to be no real limitation, especially in the light of this course.

color depth

An aspect I already touched upon is the quality of the graphics of the system of a viewer. The days of 256 color displays are far from over, especially in academic circles, and care should be taken in the use of a lot of color on a page. Running out of color may have disastrous effects on the material you are presenting, since particular colors may be replaced by completely contrasting ones. An additional benefit of limiting the amount of colors is that image sizes will decrease (for GIF, that is). Using JPEGs on your pages will always tax a 256 color system to its limits.

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