RE: [Zope] Text won't Wrap on Zope site
I guess I can explain that. If the site _is_ fit to a certain size, on a "big screen" you have the option to enlarge the window; on a small screen, you don't. That doesn't mean you should design to fit a full screen, as there are other factors, such as people with disabilities or poor eyesight, as one poster pointed out. 620 seems to be a good page width. It fits any browser running on a 640x480 screen, and it's a comfortable page width for reading -- about the size of a paperback book page, I think. -- Alexander Staubo http://www.mop.no/~alex/ "He won a first at Oxford, squandered three fortunes, made love to a thousand women, imbibed strange drugs, sold his soul for Rock 'n' Roll, almost pipped Einstein for the Nobel Prize, was barred from every Chinese noodle parlour in West London and died penniless, at a Hastings boarding-house in his ninetieth year." --Robert Rankin, _The Book of Ultimate Truths_
-----Original Message----- From: cg@cdegroot.com [mailto:cg@cdegroot.com] Sent: 15. juli 1999 00:07 To: Alexander Staubo; zope@zope.org Subject: Re: [Zope] Text won't Wrap on Zope site
alex@mop.no said:
It seems the site in general is tailored to an 800x600 resolution -- which isn't a high resolution by most standards today.
Which is something I never understood. I run on a 1024x768 screen, but that doesn't mean that all my Netscape windows are full-screen. 648x743 seems to be the size of the day on my laptop.
Designing pages for a screen size shows that you actually were designing a paper brochure - backwards thinking ;-)
-- Cees de Groot http://www.cdegroot.com <cg@cdegroot.com>
[Quickly approaching off-topicness ;-)]
620 seems to be a good page width. It fits any browser running on a 640x480 screen, and it's a comfortable page width for reading -- about the size of a paperback book page, I think.
It seems that Microsoft started this craze for broad pages by making IE so that it comes up in a "landscape" window (at least, that's what I remember from the one time I ran the thing - no worries, I had my computer inside a five-pointed star and a circle of lit candles ;-)). This is nice for web brochures, which, like real paper brochures, are void of information in any format. However, at least the coming few decades, for textual content the reference format is a book. The Book Interface[tm], determined by the paper size and margins, is almost strictly portrait with an aspect ratio of 4x3 or thereabouts. This is not without reason: it is harder to read long lines. Consequently, a lot of users surfing mostly information pages have their browsers in a portrait-sized window. This is also the default for Netscape to come up with. The width varies - on my 1024x768 screen I have the outer window size between 600 and 620, meaning that for content you have ~580 pixels, but sometimes I make it smaller in order to fit another window besides it. Anyway, the only conclusion you can draw from the discussion is not to make any assumptions on the screen width, and to attempt to allow for strange window sizes as much as possible. This is especially important for documentation pages, because they're typically used in a "secondary" window besides the "main" window (where the documented piece of software runs). For this purpose alone, I'd like the Zope docs to fit in windows as small as, say, 540 pixels accross... -- Cees de Groot http://www.cdegroot.com <cg@cdegroot.com>
At 07:54 15/07/99 , Cees de Groot wrote:
It seems that Microsoft started this craze for broad pages by making IE so that it comes up in a "landscape" window (at least, that's what I remember from the one time I ran the thing - no worries, I had my computer inside a five-pointed star and a circle of lit candles ;-)).
This is nice for web brochures, which, like real paper brochures, are void of information in any format. However, at least the coming few decades, for textual content the reference format is a book. The Book Interface[tm], determined by the paper size and margins, is almost strictly portrait with an aspect ratio of 4x3 or thereabouts. This is not without reason: it is harder to read long lines.
Consequently, a lot of users surfing mostly information pages have their browsers in a portrait-sized window. This is also the default for Netscape to come up with. The width varies - on my 1024x768 screen I have the outer window size between 600 and 620, meaning that for content you have ~580 pixels, but sometimes I make it smaller in order to fit another window besides it.
Anyway, the only conclusion you can draw from the discussion is not to make any assumptions on the screen width, and to attempt to allow for strange window sizes as much as possible. This is especially important for documentation pages, because they're typically used in a "secondary" window besides the "main" window (where the documented piece of software runs). For this purpose alone, I'd like the Zope docs to fit in windows as small as, say, 540 pixels accross...
The point is more that code examples should not wrap, at least not without clear visual hints to the user. They are therefore rendered in <PRE> tags, that keep the spacing and linebreaks verbatim. All other text does wrap automatically to the width of the window. You'll only have to scroll to read the <PRE> formatted code examples, a good thing, in my opinion. The problem lies with the way that browsers wrap text within a tablecell. The current Zope site uses a table layout, with navigation on the left, and content on the right. Normally, the table is fitted within the visible width of the browser, and text is wrapped inside that cell. However, when you use <PRE> formatted text within that cell that requires more width than is available on screen, the width of the tablecell is expanded to accommodate these paragraphs. Thus, the width of the tablecell is expanded to allow for the widest <PRE> tag to fit, and all text in that cell is rewrapped to the new width. When that width means that the whole table doesn't fit within the visible width of the browser, though, you'll have to scroll. This is not something the designer of the page can readily influence. There is no easy solution to this if you want to keep the table layout. However, at the bottom of _every_ page on zope.org is a link titled 'Printable Page', that will display the content _without_ a table layout, showing all text neatly wrapped within the visible width of your browser, except of course the <PRE> formatted text. -- Martijn Pieters, Web Developer | Antraciet http://www.antraciet.nl | Tel: +31-35-7502100 Fax: +31-35-7502111 | mailto:mj@antraciet.nl http://www.antraciet.nl/~mj | PGP: http://wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xA8A32149 ------------------------------------------
participants (3)
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Alexander Staubo -
cg＠cdegroot.com -
Martijn Pieters