Architectures and Interfaces

Last night's reading covered basic web site interface and navigation design principles, as well as the site-level and web-level architecture of the world wide web. While I hope that we look into the macro-architecture a bit more (that reading felt too academic for both it's own good and my ability to fully understand it), the other two were fairly straightforward.

The core principles in page/site design boil down to the idea that your work needs to be accessible to the widest audience available. This involves everything from writing it in a way that can be parsed by legacy (read: really old) browsers (as pointed out in the W3C page) to making it fit in a small enough space that it could be displayed on a range of monitors (as per Robin Williams (not the comedian)). It also involves less "technical" concepts such as redundant navigation and labeling, balancing the navigation between levels, etc.

While I appreciate the concepts presented, I can't help but feel like the Williams is outdated. I'd think it should be hard to find a 640x480 monitor these days (she also neglects to account for scroll bars in her page dimension recommendation of 640x460). A really nice direction to go from ehre would be to have something that appropriately surveys current technologies so that we can see what we need to account for these days. How much monitor space do we need? What minimum connection speed should we expect to deal with? What are current culturally-embedded design elements that we could use with little or no explanation?