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The rising popularity of netbooks, those popular mini-notebooks designed primarily for web browsing and email, means it's time to once again re-examine the assumptions behind web design and web application user inteface.

Sometime within the last few years, most web designers shifted away from assuming that the lowest common denominator was an 800 by 600 pixel display. The new most common target was 1024 by 800, with the understanding that many viewers would have bigger, higher-resolution displays. Some of the first netbooks came out with 800 by 600 screens, and now the emerging netbook standard seems to be 1024 by 600, meaning that it's primarily vertical screen real estate that the netbook user is giving up.

The physical width of the screen, typically 10 inches or less, also means that those pixels are crowded into a smaller area, meaning that eye strain may also be an issue for small fonts.But the main issue for application designers (and to a lesser extent for the designers of web brochureware) is how much information fits"above the break" on a page. This can be a problem if the user has to scroll up and down to see related options or buttons on a user interface form, which he would be able to see at a glance on a normal screen. User interfaces that feature pop-up windows or JavaScript overlays may be impossible to navigate if the designer fails to provide a scrollbar.

If you don't have a netbook handy, you can test your user interface with a utility such as the Firefox Web Developer add-on, which will let you resize the browser display to any size you specify.

The idea behind these devices is to hit a low price target by giving netbooks just enough computing power for web and email, and they generally snub Windows Vista as too much of a resource hog. Instead, they run either Windows XP or Linux, often a version of Linux optimized specifically for the resource and user interface constraints of the netbook environment.

Of course, you're not supposed to be optimizing your websites and applications for a specific operating system in the first place, you're supposed to be designing for cross-platform web standards. But the rise of netbooks is another reason not to develop sloppy habits. That also extends to not putting too much reliance on plug-ins that may not be available for the netbook environment and thinking twice about resource-intensive JavaScript/AJAX routine.

For further reading, see Should You Redesign Your Website to 800x600 - Or Wait For Netbook Makers to Wake Up and Give Us Decent Screens? and Netbooks Offer a Chance to Challenge Windows' Long Reign