It's not entirely fixed-width, though. One nested column (the one containing the actual content) is fixed-width and left-justified within another column that expands to fill the window with whitespace. It's hideous.
Great work!
I join the margins bandwagon: when displaying a single column, it would be great to be able to have a not too big page width, as very long lines on a desktop monitor are hard to read.
the very same reason newspapers have columns and not full width text.
Newspapers also do not have 6-inch margins on either side.
Another irritation of mine is fixed-width sites. If I'm making my browser window wider, chances are I'm trying to widen the text, not expect it to stay in a narrow column in the middle with useless space on either side. If I wanted it narrow, I would've narrowed the window.
The amount of columns displayed depends on the width of the window, with generous margins to the sides (you could fit an extra column without margins).
Yeah I prefer a single column while keeping the window at the full width of the display. It tends to shrink the window to fit it's preconceived notions of "vertical rhythm" as they call it in the text world I guess - or usually trying to keep the width to 70-80 characters. I don't like this though
It behaves oddly. If I make my window very wide, the text takes up a reasonable width in the center. Then as I drag the window edge to make it smaller, the column suddenly gets wider. As I continue to make the window narrower, it gets to the point where there's no whitespace until it gets very narrow, then a small amount of whitespace (but enough) is introduced on the sides.
This is, of course, a personal preference, but I would much rather have a column with a fixed width based on how many characters we can expect in that column. Lines stretching across the screen at 120+ characters can be unwieldy.
That's the reason i don't maximize windows. Sites like HN let lines of text go way too far for a window that's 1000+ px wide.
I don't understand why people complain about line length when that really means you should just resize the window to your preference.
On the other hand, pages that stay in a narrow column in the middle when I widen the window really infuriate me, because I explicitly asked for wider columns and am not getting it.
I think this is actually a little subtle: if you don’t have fixed-width columns then changing the visibility (or more strictly the display property) of rows can require column widths to be recalculated which is often pretty slow. It’s easy to say that obviously you should just set fixed widths but it is pretty hard to decide what they should be in practice if you want the page to still work when someone resizes their window.
To my mind even this contains unnecessary elements, and I hate fixed-width narrow columns. I've tried to push the limits of the absolute minimum of distraction in my own blog (http://m50d.github.com); I'd be interested to hear of people taking similar approaches.
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