OFF-TOPIC but relevant [LWN.net]

OFF-TOPIC but relevant

Posted Aug 18, 2008 10:52 UTC (Mon) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
In reply to: OFF-TOPIC but relevant by janfrode
Parent article: An update on Fedora's "issues"

I agree, the text width should depend on the width of the browser and the size of the font,
unless it's plain text being reproduced verbatim (like a raw e-mail).  Horizontal scrollbars
are annoying even on a desktop browser.  On the other hand I think mobile browsers should work
around this, which is hardly a unique issue to LWN.  LWN pages look fine on Opera Mini, on my
mobile phone.

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OFF-TOPIC but relevant

Posted Aug 18, 2008 11:14 UTC (Mon) by janfrode (subscriber, #244) [Link]

In opera mini I can read about 40 characters before I need to scroll. Your comment used more than 90 characters per line. So more than two pages to scroll sideways back and forth for every line to read.

I try to optimize it by reading two lines at the time, but it gets confusing :-)

I posted this as "HTML" instead of "Plain text". wonder if that will make any difference..

OFF-TOPIC but relevant

Posted Aug 18, 2008 15:37 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Yep it does.. The parent to your post has his comment in 'pre' tags. Yours uses regular HTML formatting. Its very noticeable in the Comments RSS feed..

OFF-TOPIC but relevant

Posted Aug 18, 2008 16:01 UTC (Mon) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

FWIW, the problems with the current formatting of "plain text" comments are well understood; it's on my list to do something smarter. But the previous attempt (which tended to render as a bunch of long-line/short-line pairs) wasn't very nice either. I'll probably end up doing something simpler which will not try so hard to preserve formatting in the plain text mode.

OFF-TOPIC but relevant

Posted Aug 18, 2008 15:39 UTC (Mon) by janfrode (subscriber, #244) [Link]

Yes, my "HTML"-posting above was perfectly readable on my cellphone.