Creating Websites for the 4630 IP Telephone
Images
The use of images in a web page is always a concern. For example, a page with many images can cause downloading to be slow. While this is still a concern in the phone, the size of an image has a much greater effect. Memory in the browser, and in the phone in general, is limited. Each image will use a sizable amount of memory, and the browser may become overwhelmed. An image should only be used if it is essential to a page.
Images also fall into the realm of
Animated GIF images are a bad idea since they use up quite a bit of memory. Additionally, because of the persistence of the LCD screen, animated images tend to smear in the browser and lose their effectiveness. Hence, animated GIFs are considered "not supported" with this phone.
Frames
While frames provide a useful method of browsing a series of pages (via a contents frame and a document text frame), they also use up real estate, just like scrollbars. Even if the frame decorations were all turned off, the frame containing the majority of the document text now suffers the problems discussed above; the width of the frame is smaller, and the chances of adding a horizontal scrollbar have increased. Additionally, a single line of text will have fewer characters viewable, and the page becomes even more difficult to read and comprehend. Using simple navigation buttons at the top and bottom of the page, or even at the top and bottom of each section should make up for the missing contents frame.
The interaction between frames and scrollbars is another important area of concern. While most browsers manage scrolling within each frame independently, the 4630 Web Access Application only scrolls the entire (single) window. This moves the user's view of the frames as a whole, but it does not scroll any of the data in individual frames. There will likely be data in frames that can never be seen.
The combined problems of minimal screen real estate and the scrolling issues really makes frames something simply to avoid.
Fonts
Font size is a major concern in the browser. Without designer intervention, the browser displays text as if it were running on a PC in a normal width and height display. This means that the fonts shown would appear huge relative to the screen size. As a result, only seven lines of text will be viewed in the browser when no font sizing is applied. Additionally, only about 25 characters would be viewed per line. This would generally be unusable from a practical point of view.
Design Guidelines
