And now, another in a series of exciting episodes...
It's
"In My Opinion"
with Dave Abrahams.
Good evening, folks.
http://alistapart.com/articles/css3multicolumn contains a good
description of some of the problems of well-used screen real-estate.
If you don't consider long lines to be a problem, then our current
solution -- and that used by many sites -- is a reasonable one: just
spread text to the edges of the available space and tell people to
adjust their browser's width to make it legible.
However:
* long lines pose well-known and proven readability hurdles
(http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/42/text_length.htm)
* Boost itself has a guideline that lines of code should be kept to
within 80 characters
* If you ever want to publish documentation with Addison-Wesley,
they'll require you to keep it to within 65 characters, because
otherwise it won't fit on the page
* Ditto for being able to print PDFs of your documentation
* Since line breaks are fixed in code, if code examples *do* follow
the guidelines, a wide browser window really wastes a lot of space.
Yet we are not using a fixed-width layout primarily because some
people complain vociferously that we're preventing them from using
screen real-estate efficiently.
http://beta.boost.org/ currently uses a CSS-only design that
dynamically rearranges columns according to the width of your
browser. However, the text does not flow across these columns, so
that approach isn't really appropriate for many of our pages.
http://randysimons.com/pagina_129_NL.xhtml actually approaches my
ideal for handling this problem.
This is the sort of thing that could degrade gracefully when there's
no JavaScript.
Thoughts?
--
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
http://www.boost-consulting.com
The Astoria Seminar ==> http://www.astoriaseminar.com
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