David Abrahams wrote: > 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
Yep. > * 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 That's a whole other topic, but I'm going to suggest we standardise on A4 paper sizes for our PDF's: A4 is an ISO std (unlike US letter) and in practice is just slightly smaller all round than US letter, which should keep folks on both sides of the Atlantic happy I hope! > * 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. Like you I find long line lengths and large paragraphs almost impossible to grok, especially if the font is small. However, I have to say that I find multi-columns even worse, *unless* you can guarentee that everything fits on one screen - even for folks reading on sub-mobiles with 8" screens or whatever. > 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? The main index page you refer to there scrolls so slowly on my system as to be unusable - the sample page http://randysimons.com/overige/multicolumn/ is much better in this respect, but the amount of scrolling up and down to read the columns is IMO intolerable. How would this cope with a page like this: http://freespace.virgin.net/boost.regex/toolkit/html/math_toolkit/backgrounders/remez.html that which as well as being much longer than the average reference page has more than it's fair share of media objects? John. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ Boost-docs mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe and other administrative requests: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/boost-docs
