Horizontal scroll bar

November 25, 1997  

Dear Eighty

Something on the page you are viewing is wider than your browser window. Try maximizing the browser window. If you still have a horizontal scrollbar, then it could be that the page is designed for a screen display which is wider than the one you are using.

For example, your screen might be set to 640x480, but the page is designed for 800x600. If you want to see what your screen display setting is, right-click on the Windows desktop and choose Properties (or from the Windows Start menu, select Settings | Control Panel | Display). Now click on the Settings tab, and you should see one of the following:

   

Some people prefer 640x480 because it makes pictures appear larger -- they may just prefer larger pictures, or they may have failing eyesight or something (yes, Aunt Netty is aware that this just sounds like more Boomer whining). Other people like to have as much on the screen as possible and don't mind that the pictures are smaller, so they go with the largest display (note: not all screens can show 1024x768). Feel free to experiment with your own display setting, but be warned that if you are changing from 800x600 to 640x480, Windows will probably scrunch your desktop icons around and you may have to rearrange them. By the way, no matter which setting you prefer, you can always adjust your font size separately to make text appear as large as desired.

Anyhow, let's say you're set to 640x480 and you see a horizontal scrollbar even when your browser window is maximized. This means there's something on the web page that's wider than Netscape can show in a 640x480 screen window (don't forget that some of the screen width is taken up by the vertical scrollbar, if there is one, and a few pixels by the window itself).

Now sometimes the web page contains a picture or a table that has to be wider than 640, but this actually occurs fairly rarely. Usually, the web page designer is not aware of what the page looks like on a 640x480 screen, or knows about it but doesn't know how to fix it. This is part of the web page creation learning process, and Aunt Netty's niece and nephew both have created horizontal scroll bars in their early efforts.

Two tips to ensure your page displays nicely on any size screen:

• Know your picture dimensions.

  This is a must anyway, since you should always specify the WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes of your images (along with ALT text). Think very hard about why you need a picture that is wider than, say, 600 pixels.

• Don't create very wide tables.

  This usually happens when you have many columns, and the best strategy here is to think very hard about why all those columns need to be seen together. If the table scrolls horizontally, those columns won't be seen together anyway (unlike in Excel, where you can "fix" columns so they don't scroll out of view).

  Please don't just reduce the size of the font in the table cells in the hope that the table will then fit onto the screen. Chances are you will still have too many columns for ease of comprehension, but now they're all a bit harder to see.

  Ask Aunt Netty if you have specific questions about designing tables for web pages.