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Works fine here

Posted Jan 10, 2008 22:38 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: bigpage has just stopped fitting within margins by dlang
Parent article: LWN.net: a ten-year timeline (part 1)

Just tested it on 10 years old 15" P655 ViewSonic (venerable 1152x864x75Hz) - no problems there. Come on! This monitor is older then LWN and it works fine - may be it's just time to upgrade ???

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Works fine here

Posted Jan 10, 2008 23:21 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

well, I've got two laptops, my two year old thinkpad has a 1024x768 screen and I could barely
fit the image in if I did printable mode to strip out the left column.

and I only managed it on my thinkpad becouse I use a relativly small (and ugly) font, if I
enlarged it a notch or so to use a much cleaner font it wouldn't fit.

but my two week old OLPC is only about 800x600 in color mode, so it wouldn't have a chance.

many of the cheaper projectors only do 800x600 cleanly, and going to 1024x768 comes close to
doubling the price.

sites should be designed to be readable on smaller screens, just like programmers still want
you to write code to fit in 80 columns, people sometimes want to use their larger screens for
other reasons (see multiple things at the same time or to use nicer fonts that eat pixels)

Times are changing

Posted Jan 11, 2008 7:25 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Style guide here was recently updated and now 100 characters are norm... As for supported width question - it's actually quite tough question: I have both OQO model 01+ (with 800x480 resolution) and HP LP3065 (with 2560x1600) and most sites look ridiculous either on OQO or on HP. But usually I can just use "Fit-to-Width" mode in Opera for OQO so it's not such a big deal while too narrow sites are still painful...

Works fine here

Posted Jan 12, 2008 9:26 UTC (Sat) by jbw (guest, #5689) [Link]

I think you're missing the point.  The text should always automatically adjust to the font
size and available width.  A column of text should never be wider than the screen, because
then you have to scroll back and forth horizontally to read each line.  (I personally don't
mind if the overall layout is larger than the screen as long as the text column fits within
the screen width.)  Some people with poor vision do not have the option of using a smaller
font, so it is also an accessibility issue.

Joe

It's NOT an accessibility issue

Posted Jan 12, 2008 20:10 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

LWN looks just fine here with 300% magnification on 800x600 - with "Fit-to-Width" option in Opera, of course. The problem is typical: to optimize for vast majority (normal people with normal screens) or to optimize for fringe case. IMNSHO the former is a must, the latter is optional - especially when users of said fringe cases have a working alternative (here it's "Fir-to-Width" option in Opera).

What is easier: to fix layout on thousands (or even millions) of sites or to fix one browser ? It can be done (as Opera shows) so the answer is obvious: if people care enough about such fringe cases then they can take Mozilla (or WebKit) sources and implement "Fit-to-Width" option, if not - they can at least stop complaining.