Devon, First, I sincerely apologize for characterizing your position as fixed width - it was careless of me to do so, and I do appreciate the differences between fixed width and liquid w/ min & max. Also it was rude an incorrect of me to call your opinion a "cop out".
To get back to the discussion - no disagreement from me on the need to have a min width - I completely agree with the need for that, although I also sympathize with Greg that the min width sites impose does tend to be smaller than I'd like. On the max width vs. full width thing, after reading your arguments and thinking it over, I now think that all your positions and opinions are absolutely correct. However I also think that practically speaking, it really doesn't matter very much that you are correct ;) Basically, I can see that for any given webpage that supports full-width, you could stretch that puppy out horizontally to some point that would really destroy the readability and usability of the site. So yes, assuming that width of desktops will continue to grow, there should instead be a max width every webpage will accommodate. And like you said, it's lazy design not to set that width. However, I think that practically speaking, 99% of the web audience is not going to open their windows wide enough to need that max width, and if any significant portion of the web audience is seeing a page maxed out, the designer probably set the max way too small. I personally haven't seen a site yet that went too wide on my 1600x1200 mac, but I've seen plenty that max out too small at 1280 and even quite a lot at 1024. On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 8:55 PM, Devon Scott-Tunkin <djvonfun...@yahoo.com>wrote: > you just can't win ;). > > bah, it all depends on how you define "win". If you mean please all the people all the time, yes you are correct. However if you instead define win as choose the available option that best optimizes what you want to achieve - well then you can definitely win. In fact, to go back to my point about Amazon & Google's "objective formalized testing with real customers" - Amazon.com is not currently maxing out at any pixel size - and that decision was based on split A-B testing (like almost all page content choices there ultimately are - they have an awesome split A-B engine for all their web stuff). They found out that for their existing customer base at some point in time, letting the content flow full width was better than maxing out in terms of actual customer behavior - sales and traffic and all that. (The design story for their results is probably something like customers want all the relevant content for the current page on one page, but they don't want to scroll too much and they want to see more of the content together, so use that width) So while the results for full-width vs max width for them may be a little old so maybe some newer larger customer desktop sizes could use a max width at 1800 or something like that, I'm sure their results demonstrated that having their pages max out at 1280 or even 1600 was worse than letting the pages flow. > but if you want the objectivity behind my decisions please read: > http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/feb03.asp > > It was an interesting read, thank you. But despite the fact those tested said they could concentrate better on narrower widths, I think the results definitely support the idea of wider widths being better. In particular, the stated concentration benefits did not lead to faster reading, and the scrolling length being described as better with wider columns and the single page being faster than multiple both seem to lead to putting more on a page but using all the width you've got to keep scrolling low. Anyways, to get all this back to pygame - on my 1280 wide desktop, I find the full width-ness of this page here: http://www.pygame.org/docs/ref/surface.html better than the maxed out width behavior of this page here: http://pygameweb.no-ip.org/docs/surface.html So I guess I'd say I think your max width is too low. (but the second page does look very pretty)
