/article/blueprint/intoAvailableSpaceTransformations.php
Into-Available-Space in Visual User Experiences
Certain types of spaces and information (called an entity further on) posses the capability of contraction/expansion, I call level of detail, which holds good stability in respect to the users perception and/or other cognitive processes. I'm writing some of the fundamental features I found to exist in those entities into this document.
Types in respect to native properties
- The fluidly scalable can be best explained on example of pictures, which can be (in "raster-representation" as well as "vector-"), interpolated to the correct size.
- An example of stepwise scalable is text, which can be, through setting the size of it's font, scaled -- but not as whole, and since, it may occupy only some sizes. The same would be a set of pictures in multiple resolutions where resizing is not wished for. That is as well an example of composite.
- The space filling can be presented, again, on examples of text. Text posesses flow, which line-breaks dynamically at the bounds of space it is given.
- space adapting is an example of generative process which always draws in the correct resolution. A box with a border of fixed width is not visually the same at all sizes since the border-content size ratio changes, but it conceptually stays the same, and the user recognizes it as such precisely because of those features.
- The last one is the trivial cases, of rigid. Can be resized via trimming or some other, "optical"-operations into vieport.
- As an out of the box representative: change counterfeiting.
Types in respect to presentation
There might be two of more different representations of the same entity having same or different sizes. The operations I found were a plain show-hide and fadout-fadein. Those operation enables something which I call modes of display. With pictures for example, there arise more combinations: stay low-res until high reached, downscale high-res as soon as low-res exceeded as well as fluid.