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4600 Series IP Telephone LAN Administrator's Guide
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.
To make the browser usable, some form of font sizing should be performed to allow a reasonable
amount of text to be viewed on one screen. Ideally, font sizing should be done in a single external
style sheet, and all pages should reference this style sheet. Setting font sizes in document-level
style sheets, or even worse, in in-line style sheets or <font> tags, makes it very difficult for the
designer to update font changes, and runs the risk of failing to make the change everywhere. By
using a single external style sheet, consistency in the pages is managed.
Defining fonts may be done in a static external style sheet or by dynamically generating a style
sheet using some form of server-side application, such as a CGI script or a Java servlet. Using
dynamic generation of a style sheet allows the server to decide, per user, what font size to use.
This in turn allows the user to notify the server to change the font size. All HTML pages would have
an external style sheet reference, which is another server-side executable. This executable would
dynamically generate font information based on the cookie, form component or configuration
value, relative to the IP address of the phone.
Using a static external style sheet makes page development and testing much easier, since how it
appears to the designer would be how it appears to the reader. Allowing the user to choose a font
size forces more work on the designer to verify that all fixed size items appear acceptably
Maintaining Context
Given the small working area, it is easy for the user to become lost. Headings will often not be in
view, and the user, if distracted by other work, can lose their sense of context. Style sheets may be
used to help maintain this sense of context through color. The <div> and <span> tags are intended
to provide page designer-defined content-based style. By defining classes of <div> tags with
various colors and border styles, the designer may provide additional information. It is important to
bear in mind that a significant number of people suffer from some form of color blindness. Thus, it
may be necessary to design pages both with and without using color styles.
User Interaction
As discussed above, HTML forms work reasonably well in the browser. However, due to the
limitations of the phone as an input device, keyboard input can be difficult. A complete keyboard is
made available based on the context of mouse selection. When a text input control is on-screen,
the user simply needs to click on the input control. The keyboard appears, with the browser thrown
into a small scrolling area. The input control is roughly centered in the scrolling area. The user may
then press the software keys and the text is shown in the input control. Simply pressing the done
button dismisses the keyboard, and the input control shows the newly typed text. While this
interaction technically works fine, from a user perspective, it can be difficult to type a large amount
of text. Thus, unless user input is absolutely necessary, it should be avoided. When necessary,
user input should be kept to a minimum.
Design Guidelines
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