Some basics about our wtv screen resolution.

TV's have 525 scan lines as set by the FCC, but only 483 visible lines of resolution.

This yields roughly a 640x480 screen size, however the outer 10-20% of the screen is lost due to "over scanning". You sometimes notice this as the edges of your screen appear to "bend".

That gives us the wtv screen of 560x420, but wtv imposes margins (8 pixels each side) and the status bar (36 pixels) takes away space too, leaving us with a useable
screen size of 544x372.

Wtv should in all honesty say "this web page has been modified, it has been modified to fit your screen." Like they show on video tapes.

If a web site uses frames wtv convers frames into tables. If a web page maker sets a specific width (never a good idea, I use percentages and my pages translate well between wtv's and pc's :)
for example of web pages with a width of 800, wtv squashes the info together to fit on our screen. You probably have seen sites with beautiful borders, and the text overlapping those borders, they didn't take into consideration how different browsers view web pages. I spent a lot of time researching this, you also (as a web master) cannot control how much "chrome" (navigational icon's) a user has. So don't sweat it, use tables set to 100% width with a plain white bgcolor, black text and your pages will look good in every situation. If displaying information was your original intention, some webmasters just love to show off ..... oh and don't inflict others with your music........create a clickable icon at the least, or a "music off" button......

note 7-22-2001 spent 4 hours re-reading all pages at http://developer.webtv.net to back up this next part, but can't......I thought I read that web page content shown on the screen has a natural resolution of 72 pixels per inch and Wtv based their system on that to give our printers a 72 dots per inch setting. So we would print the webpage pretty much as we saw it.

To determine the TV screens resolution developer.webtv says to divide 560 bt the width in inces of your screen..........since the resolution of the screen isn't what is being printed, this isn't important.

Any time you see in a printer's specifications an ability to print at 1200 dpi, we cannot achieve that, just 72 dpi (to the best of my knowledge).

Some manufacturer's claim a higher printing dpi, than 72 but that is for text only (?) why would anyone want text at 360dpi??? if it doesn't apply to images.....who cares....?

It works out that 72 pixels equal one inch.

So an 8.5 by 11 inch page's (we cannot use the legal size) safe printing size is 540x697 pixels.

That is Width by Height.

A business card is 247x140 pixels.

A 3 by 5 inch recipe card is 360x216 pixels

An 5 by 7 photo is 360x504 pixels

An 8 by 10 photo (will exceed the preset margins of all printer's) is 578x720 pixels.

Just multiply the dimensions by 72.....

The HP scanner has a maximum size acceptance of 4 inches by 6 inches, so that is.........??

288x432 pixels.

The image in your recent panel is 72x50 (have seen differring numbers on this)

Wtv uses a default font size of "3" which is equal to 18 pt's in CSS1 coding.

Since wtv users _do_ have the option to change their font size the following measurements are approximate.

The recent panel shows 12 characters of info.

The contacting publisher pop up shows 20 characters of info.

The caption for each favorite shows 25 characters of info.

The status bar shows 35 characters of info.

The info panel shows 100 characters of info.

Your find box can hold aprox 100 characters of info. You can copy an url, and paste it in your find box as a mini clipboard.

The go to holds an unknown quantity of characters. I use the "url gathering" trick and routinely store 25 url's plus a title for each url, with no problem. Just remember to create spaces between each url, and each title.


I read that if you put hspace="0" vspace="0" in your body tags you can reclaim some of the space lost to the margins. But you cannot place a hyperlink on the edges. I have tried that code lots of times, without seeing any difference in my pages.