Recent Features
| |||||||||||||
Opera moves to WebKit and V8Opera moves to WebKit and V8Posted Feb 18, 2013 9:29 UTC (Mon) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784)In reply to: Opera moves to WebKit and V8 by dlang Parent article: Opera moves to WebKit and V8
My experience with CSS suggests that the more rules you add to try and get things "just right", the less likely it is that you will succeed in what you are trying to achieve. Unfortunately, instead of applying a light but effective touch, people instead resort to specifying everything in fixed pixel dimensions, resulting in the ubiquitous narrow strip of content surrounded by huge tracts of empty space, as seen on many sites.
Perhaps the only thing that is more annoying than pixel-precise layout is the apparent fad for needing JavaScript to set up the layout in the first place, meaning that if you use NoScript to stop the tens of superfluous "analytics" parasites from loading their scripts, you get a blank page or maybe content overwriting itself.
(Log in to post comments)
Opera moves to WebKit and V8 Posted Feb 18, 2013 15:54 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Text is unpleasant to read when it's in wide rows on a screen. Much better to have narrow columns. At least in my experience.
Of course it's irritating when 3 column design were everything is just jammed together and you end up with the real content that is only about 15 character wide text. That's almost as bad.
Opera moves to WebKit and V8 Posted Feb 18, 2013 19:08 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
> Text is unpleasant to read when it's in wide rows on a screen. Much better to have narrow columns. At least in my experience.
The problem is that lots of websites will have a 2-3" wide column of text in a 19" wide window, the rest of the browser window is blank.
This is even worse than super wide text.
if you let your text go the width of the browser window the user can narrow the window if they want. If you lock it to a really narrow column, the user can't widen it.
Opera moves to WebKit and V8 Posted Feb 18, 2013 21:40 UTC (Mon) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
Once again someone makes my point for me better than I did! And, in any case, I can quite happily read your comment below this editing window even though it occupies around 80% of the screen width of my admittedly small monitor.
People seem to forget that observations about the readability of wide columns of text are accompanied by recommendations that do not simply end with "restrict the width to ten words". Such recommendations came about through centuries of experience with the printed word and included other measures such as increasing the line spacing or "leading", or using shorter paragraphs (a general trend in mainstream writing, particularly in electronic media).
I do agree that CSS is a fairly poor tool for dealing with flexible layout and thus delivering multiple columns without a lot of extra work, however.
|
|||||||||||||