Creating Web Sites for the 4630/4630SW IP Telephone
166 4600 Series IP Telephone LAN Administrator Guide
images during setup also speeds up image downloading. Finally, reducing the size of the image
reduces the amount of memory used.
Animated GIF images are a bad idea since they use up quite a bit of memory. Additionally,
because of the persistence of the LCD screen, animated images tend to smear in the browser
and lose their effectiveness. Therefore, animated GIFs are considered “not supported” with this
telephone.
Frames
While contents and document text frames provide a useful method to browse a series of pages,
frames also use up real estate, just like scrollbars. Even if the frame decorations are all turned
off, a frame containing the majority of the document text suffers the problems discussed in
Images
—the frame width is smaller, increasing the chances of adding a horizontal scrollbar.
Additionally, a single text line has fewer viewable characters, and the page becomes even more
difficult to read and comprehend. Using simple top and bottom page or section navigation
buttons, can make up for the missing contents frame.
The interaction between frames and scrollbars is another important area of concern. While most
browsers manage scrolling within each frame independently, the 4630 Web Access Application
only scrolls the entire (single) window. Scrolling by window moves the user's view of the frames
as a whole, but does not scroll any of the data in individual frames. Data is likely to be in frames
that can never be seen.
Minimal screen real estate and scrolling issues make frames something to avoid.
Fonts
Font size is a major concern in the browser. Without designer intervention, the browser displays
text as if it were running on a PC in a normal width and height display. This means that the fonts
shown appear huge relative to the screen size. As a result, only seven lines of text can be
viewed in the browser when no font sizing is applied. Additionally, only about 25 characters are
viewable per line. From a practical point of view, this situation is not usable.
To make the browser usable, perform some form of font sizing to allow a reasonable amount of
text to be viewed per screen. Ideally, put font sizing in a single external style sheet, and make all
pages reference this style sheet. Do not set font sizes in document-level style sheets, or even
worse, for in-line style sheets or <font> tags. Doing so makes it very difficult for the designer to
update font changes, and runs the risk of failing to make a universal change. Use a single
external style sheet to manage consistency in the pages.
Define fonts using a static external style sheet. You can also generate a style sheet dynamically
using some form of server-side application, such as a CGI script or a Java servlet. Dynamic
style sheet generation allows the server to decide, per user, what font size to use. This in turn
allows the user to notify the server to change the font size. All HTML pages would have an
external style sheet reference, another server-side executable. This executable dynamically
