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It's the Art, Stupid
13 years ago
So I grabbed an invite from 
muzz to get on that Weasyl site everybody's talking about. You can find me here:
https://www.weasyl.com/profile/nanimoose
But Weasyl is going to get no further uploads from me if they don't address this one tiny niggling issue I have with their site.
It's the same issue that has kept me disinterested in InkBunny.
It's an issue that has a workaround here at FA only because of a bug in the code.
The issue is this: YOU DON'T SHOW ART IN ITS DISPLAY PAGE AT ITS NATIVE RESOLUTION. You're an art site. I draw art digitally. I'm looking for you to present the art IN ITS ORIGINAL FORM. I don't want it shrunk or re-compressed or mangled in any way. Just show it. Show it as I intended it to be shown.
At InkBunny, they limited the size of the art because the whole site has a fixed-width layout. The site is designed to fit within a 1024 pixel-wide display. My monitor is 1920x1200. My browser doesn't even take up my full screen width, but the InkBunny site looks like this:
| < M A S S I V E _ T R E N C H > | (content) | < M A S S I V E _ T R E N C H > |
And any art that gets displayed in that space gets shrunk down to fit, at a maximum of 920 pixels horizontally or vertically.
Weasyl also operates in a fixed-width layout, but it's a little smarter about it. Their site is designed to render at 1650 pixels wide, but scales down to fit smaller browsers. This is great, I thought, the largest of my recent pictures is 1500 pixels wide, so obviously there's room for that!
Well there's room for it, yes, but it goes unused. Weasyl shrinks down any displayed artwork to fit within 800x600. Eight hundred! By six hundred! What is this, the late 90's?! Ridiculous!
Once again I'm left with FurAffinity as my only option, not because of any technological edge it has, but for the sort of wild-west lawlessness its loose and buggy code allows. FA says when you upload something that the maximum image dimensions are 1280x1280. And indeed, when you first upload something larger, it is shrunk down to fit within those dimensions. But if you go back and "update" the art again, with the very same file even, then it doesn't bother to check the dimensions and lets it through. (this is why artists who upload big things are always telling you to "hit F5" to see it bigger)
I'm constantly afraid that some day FA is going to start actually enforcing that 1280 max. I swear, FA, if you take this away from me, I'm leaving and making my OWN art site! (with blackjack! and hookers!)
So a final plea to any art site admins or coders out there. You're making an ART site. It's not about little features like folders or groups. It's not about friending and faving. It's the art, stupid. An art site's focus should be on the art. Everything else is secondary.
muzz to get on that Weasyl site everybody's talking about. You can find me here:https://www.weasyl.com/profile/nanimoose
But Weasyl is going to get no further uploads from me if they don't address this one tiny niggling issue I have with their site.
It's the same issue that has kept me disinterested in InkBunny.
It's an issue that has a workaround here at FA only because of a bug in the code.
The issue is this: YOU DON'T SHOW ART IN ITS DISPLAY PAGE AT ITS NATIVE RESOLUTION. You're an art site. I draw art digitally. I'm looking for you to present the art IN ITS ORIGINAL FORM. I don't want it shrunk or re-compressed or mangled in any way. Just show it. Show it as I intended it to be shown.
At InkBunny, they limited the size of the art because the whole site has a fixed-width layout. The site is designed to fit within a 1024 pixel-wide display. My monitor is 1920x1200. My browser doesn't even take up my full screen width, but the InkBunny site looks like this:
| < M A S S I V E _ T R E N C H > | (content) | < M A S S I V E _ T R E N C H > |
And any art that gets displayed in that space gets shrunk down to fit, at a maximum of 920 pixels horizontally or vertically.
Weasyl also operates in a fixed-width layout, but it's a little smarter about it. Their site is designed to render at 1650 pixels wide, but scales down to fit smaller browsers. This is great, I thought, the largest of my recent pictures is 1500 pixels wide, so obviously there's room for that!
Well there's room for it, yes, but it goes unused. Weasyl shrinks down any displayed artwork to fit within 800x600. Eight hundred! By six hundred! What is this, the late 90's?! Ridiculous!
Once again I'm left with FurAffinity as my only option, not because of any technological edge it has, but for the sort of wild-west lawlessness its loose and buggy code allows. FA says when you upload something that the maximum image dimensions are 1280x1280. And indeed, when you first upload something larger, it is shrunk down to fit within those dimensions. But if you go back and "update" the art again, with the very same file even, then it doesn't bother to check the dimensions and lets it through. (this is why artists who upload big things are always telling you to "hit F5" to see it bigger)
I'm constantly afraid that some day FA is going to start actually enforcing that 1280 max. I swear, FA, if you take this away from me, I'm leaving and making my OWN art site! (with blackjack! and hookers!)
So a final plea to any art site admins or coders out there. You're making an ART site. It's not about little features like folders or groups. It's not about friending and faving. It's the art, stupid. An art site's focus should be on the art. Everything else is secondary.
*asks random passerby* Buddy! What year is it??
But 800x600?! That's practically a postage stamp these days.
Writing
I came back to re-check on this thread to see if there was any more insight, so just wondering if you had more to say about this.
People say it's new, it's better, its admins listen and fix problems faster...
Well....wasn't fa like that when it was just a few furs? What happens when the hundreds become hundreds of thousands? How will it handle then? My guess is no better than any other furry site, so why throw everything into something that is not as established only to have the same things later :-/
Fad site
Fa already has a rep, yeah I'm sure it has its complaints and such, I'm just saying I've never had any inconveniences really since being apart of it. At least none that affect my enjoyment directly. Its a shiny new toy, lets just see what happens.
My point is you don't really seem to be aware of the history behind FA! The site literally was down for a long period only a few months after it opened due to a major disagreement between admins, and there's never really been enough of a major improvement to the site's governance structure since. Weasyl learning that lesson from FA *is* a major advantage, and just saying that "it will be exactly like FA when it becomes popular" is ignoring the reasons that led to problems at FA.
But Weasyl already has two things going for it LEAPS AND BOUNDS over FA. One is that it's simple, beautiful, and easy to use. Another, much more importantly, is while I can't say for sure it's more secure than FA --- I'd bet a lot of money on it that it is.
So, I don't get overly excited about hype. But Weasyl does have my hopes. Big confident ones.
I'm not even bothering with the site.
Then again I might be misunderstanding you.
In InkBunny's case, I just can't stand the fixed-width design. It's inefficient, lazy, and imposes artificial limits. I want no part of it.
Also, some people don't have large res monitors, like myself about a year ago when I was on a very crappy netbook with a teeny screen and tinier resolution. I had it set to display the even smaller "not-full" version here on FA just so I could properly browse the site, clicking "show full" only when it was something that caught my eyes. So it ends up working out.
Personally, and this is just my opinion, I like how IB does it where they can optionally view the full res version. You have a tiny, larger and optional full res verison.
I see what you're talking about though, don't get me wrong. I'm sure there's more efficient way of doing it.
I'm mostly not bothered with all these new sites because plenty of new sites have popped up since I started hanging out in furry communities and literally the ONLY one that caught on properly was FA, and that was only because dA decided to make rules against porn.
There ARE features/policies that I'd go to a new site over, but so far those only seem to exist in the mock-AUP document I have sitting on my hard drive waiting for me to win the lottery and hire coders to make me a site to my specs.
I'm mostly not bothered with all these new sites because plenty of new sites have popped up since I started hanging out in furry communities and literally the ONLY one that caught on properly was FA, and that was only because dA decided to make rules against porn.
There ARE features/policies that I'd go to a new site over, but so far those only seem to exist in the mock-AUP document I have sitting on my hard drive waiting for me to win the lottery and hire coders to make me a site to my specs.
I'm a qualified Tier 2 help help technician if you need it for your global porn enterprise
Maybe they're doing that to try and keep load times fast?
At first, I thought it was a tech glitch that no one bothered to report. I reported some glitches prior to noticing 'this' to the admin, and she fixed them right away and with a response.
However, when I notified her on this topic, no response...no nothing. So I've strayed away from the site ever since. It's very disappointing, the website has a LOT of potential, but that one, tiny, little...flaw...keeps me away. :C
That's a neat little workaround I didn't know existed. Hopefully FA doesn't fix this because that's kind of useful.
... well played ;w;
I'll wait until after the flood, and the hype, THEN I may check it out.
I have two sites for me already, anyway... And I don't mind IB's system of 'click - new window full size' ^^
But yes. Stepping back and seeing what happens now.
Users do not care about how much a site costs to run.
Users do not care about anything which negatively impacts their experience with a site
Users want a site that "just works" and do not care about how technically difficult this is to implement.
And most important of all...
Users will go where ever the content is.
Seriously though. I have a FA, and IB and a DA(i just watch there) i don't need another site. Especially
with the invite or pay to get in attitude. I'll keep an eye on the weasel site. but im not all that interested/
next you will want us to bite your shiny metal ass
(Though - why post your journal here and not on Weasyl where the admins are more likely to see it? ;)
Also, I've said it before and I'll say it again, Weasyl is like the Google+ to FA's Facebook... even though I hate FB and G+ >.<
Good design isn't broken by large images. The designer could make the comments table separate from the image element in a way that isolates its width, or put the image in some sort of overflow-controlled container that can pan.
Have you seen a modern PHONE or TABLET? Apple and Google are engaging in a DPI war, both sides now reaching or surpassing 300 DPI! That 800x600 limit is physically smaller than a business card on these devices' native resolutions. A 15" 3rd gen iPad has more pixels in both dimensions than my 22" monitor.
Resolution independence still isn't a concept that's taking off. HTML has always failed at it... miserably... and native apps (sporting advanced 3D hardware compositing) aren't any better, apparently.
My favorite stupidity is how older web browsers could scale the font sizes independently of everything else. Is the text hard to read? Just make it bigger. Oh, wait... most web designers aren't making their pages properly to support fonts of different sizes. No problem, we'll just zoom everything instead. Perfect for tablets! Why make text bigger when you can zoom in and have to constantly pan back-and-forth so see a damn thing? It makes so much sense!
I worry about the future. Glossy buttons and animated effects != usability.
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1">
That tag will cause most mobile browsers to render at native resolution and disable pinchy-zooming. Through JS, you can get good support of touch controls, even read each finger of multi-touch individually.
I'm only just starting to learn about this stuff, but it's much deeper than I had expected. So, don't go blaming the device for being bad at rendering an interface that wasn't designed for it.
It doesn't help that fairly modern browsers, like Firefox 3, still don't handle floats correctly. Document layout should have been a solved problem 10 years ago, and people are still arguing about how to play audio.
It's not like column layout has been every web designer's nightmare for 15 years or anything.
If you're looking to control "margins" on table cells, the CSS bits you're looking for are border-spacing and border-collapse. These are applied to the table tag, not the individual cells, since it wouldn't make logical sense to have different values on cells within the same table. Pretty much everything else should apply to cells fairly normally.
Hell, when I wrote a thumbnail system for my oekaki, I found out that GD-Lib doesn't even let you specify a container size. You have to calculate the width and height ratios manually. WTF? I can't count colors? I can't scan for empty alpha channels? I can't test average saturation to set the chroma sub-sampling correctly? Why hasn't anyone made a proper library for this stuff?
I wrote my system so that images with a small enough file size are shown at native resolution, and only pictures that would suck bandwidth are made into thumbnails. Why are there so few galleries that do that? It just makes so much sense.
One of these days I'll get around to making an image analysis library specifically for thumbnails.
... and that didn't go as well as planned xP Sounded better in my head heh.
It's really nicely made. It even loads the smaller size first and displays that until you have the full-res downloaded.