nevin opened this issue on May 31, 2001 ยท 14 posts
Chas posted Thu, 31 May 2001 at 6:51 AM
This is something that should have been addressed before beginning. If you present single panels only, then you'd be much more limited in terms of breaking borders, panel interaction and direction of the eye within the page. If you have not done any of these, then your work is already a bit more conducive to single-frame presentation, and you don't really gain anything visually by presenting a page. Too, different users will have different screen resolutions, and you need to have something condusive to even the smallest browser. There's nothing worse than having to scroll down AND to the right -- and sideways scrolling is an awkward browsing experience, and would make your pages seem to laborous to read. Keeping it within 640 pixels wide (a good rule of thumb) will be much easier for a single-frame presentation. The advantage to full-page presentation (not including the inter-page art composition issues mentioned above) is that a reader can read more per click, and not have to turn the page so often. He'd have to click and wait for a page to load 24 times, as opposed to (6 x 24 average) 144 times. For slower connections, the waiting for images to load will be intolerable. If you have a good amount of webspace, you may want to make both versions available so that slower viewers will have this option. If not, the single-frame approach may win out, but not by acclamation. One approach I saw that helped slower browsers was a single-frame comic in which the "Next" and "Back" buttons didn't call for thumbnails, but were in fact the actual frames, but with reduced sizes specified in the IMG tag, so that they appeared as thumbnails. What this meant was that while a viewer was reading frame 3, for example, frame 4 was already loading onto his/her computer. This makes for a much faster experience, and reduces the toil of that many "page turns."