4600 Series IP Telephone LAN Administrator’s Guide
Cookies
Cookies can be a useful feature in maintaining the state of a user when interacting with a web site. HTTP provides no state information, such as when or how often a user has visited a site. Cookies allow web sites to track this information by storing a simple set of values on the browser for the current session. Normally, browsers also provide the ability to save cookies to disk, so this information may be retained between sessions. However, the 4630 IP Telephone browser has no such ability to save any data between sessions. Cookies do behave well within the realm of the current session, and may be employed if desired. The 4630 IP Telephone has a maximum of 8Kilobytes of data available for cookie storage.
Design Guidelines
This section presents guidelines for developing a good model that effectively presents web pages to be viewed on the 4630 IP Telephone Browser. The biggest challenge in designing pages for this browser is the limited amount of space available for viewing the pages. The 4630 IP Telephone screen is a ¼ VGA display. Part of that screen is lost to the browser by the main controls of the 4630 IP Telephone. Thus, page layout must be done effectively and efficiently so as to avoid causing more space to be lost through additional screen controls such as scrollbars. Font sizing will make or break the usability of a page. A balance must be found between fitting as much text as is possible, and allowing users to read the text without straining their eyes.
Fixed-Width Objects
One of the primary functions of a web browser is to present text, wrapped at the right (or left when dealing with internationalization) border of the browser window. The browser always attempts to avoid adding a horizontal scrollbar. However, if
Web browsers do not resize themselves larger when scrollbars are added. Thus, if there are more lines of text than can fit in the height of the browser window, a vertical scrollbar is added. This now takes up some of the width of the browser, and less text is displayed on a single line. If text is wider than the width of the browser, a horizontal scrollbar is added. This now takes up some of the height of the browser, and fewer lines of text are displayed.
Given the small size of the browser, it is highly desirable to avoid causing scrollbars to appear. Unless the amount of text shown in a page is kept to a bare minimum, it is unlikely that a vertical scrollbar will be avoided. However, avoiding
In general, if scrolling is a requirement, vertical scrolling is better perceived by users than horizontal scrolling.
Design Guidelines
