Ticket #173 (new enhancement)

Opened 1 year ago

Last modified 1 year ago

Max-width (for improved readability and widescreen compability)

Reported by: daniel Assigned to: fox
Priority: wishlist Milestone:
Component: interface Version:
Keywords: Cc:

Description

The goal of this ticket is to improve overall readability and make the site work better for users with widescreen displays.

See the attachment for an example of how I see things. (It should explain why I want bigger headlines too.)

The first thing you see is that the date and time appear way over to the right. It should appear much more to the left. Preferrably below the title alongside the item author. As of now, the date and title appears way too far from the title and author name. Open any newspaper or magazine. You will see that the most common schema is:

‘Item title
date - author (or the other way around)’

Second problem is the text block lenght. Search the web for tons, and tons of usability tests agreeing on the same thing: Text blocks should be 65–75 character long. This could be accheived by applying ‘min-width: 65ex; max-width: 75ex;’ to the item text block. Non-IE compatible, but the IE7 JavaScript library would fix that.

Note that this only applies to large text blocks such as the main content (or item text block, as I have called it) of a page.

Attachments

wiiide.png (54.0 kB) - added by daniel on 11/17/07 21:32:08.

Change History

11/17/07 21:32:08 changed by daniel

  • attachment wiiide.png added.

11/17/07 22:14:24 changed by fox

You see, the _actual_ underlying problem is that people (particularly, with Windows background) are too fond of maximizing their windows. This is why the window is too wide, because you made it so wide. The web is not printed media or PDF, you can't resize newspaper but you can resize your browser window. Do so until you start feeling comfortable about reading the content. This is how this problem should be solved.

Example 1, my desktop: http://bah.org.ru/images/shots/2007-11-17_desktop.png

Limiting textblock width is a very bad idea, because it reduces functionality instead of adding it. The ability to adapt to some width set by user is a lot more precious than forcing some specific default. Dynamic layout is is an added function of the web, which is impossible on printed paper, how can I possibly remove it? So, basically, no fricken way this ever will be in the trunk. Use custom stylesheets if you prefer to have a lot of whitespace in your humongously wide browser window.

11/17/07 22:24:14 changed by daniel

For text blocks, yes. But you cannot argue for the date placement with the same arguments.

11/18/07 01:51:50 changed by fox

The date placement is a compromise. Reasons being:

1. I can't put everything on the left side, like Headline - Author - Date because: 1a. It would really unbalance things to the left and displease me aesthetically. :-) 1b. Spatially, it would be worse, because the whole thing is of varying length and I wouldn't know where to look for the date (I know now - it's always on the right). 1c. The date is a lower priority information than the headline - you know it's fresh if it's unread and on the top. I rarely, if ever, glance on the actual date myself. 2. I can't put auxilary information behind the headline because pixel-conscious people would eat me alive. I recently had to defend every fricken linebreak in combined mode. It really is exhausting.

11/18/07 02:20:48 changed by daniel

Fixing ticket #168 would help. Enlarging the headline font size would give the title more weight and would also push it closer to the right side date.