[ZWeb] karl on greenspun on nielsen

Paul Everitt paul@digicool.com
Mon, 06 Nov 2000 18:45:28 -0500


Hmm, can you give some URLs on zope.org that exhibit the horizontal
scrolling and the big wide empty margins?

I _think_ the issue is code snippets or URLs that have PRE around them. 
Unfortunately there's not a lot that can be done on this.  Still, I'd
like to see some of the examples you've mentioned.

I think Zope.org reserves a good portion of screen space for the actual
content of a page.  Perhaps you think the left-hand sidebar should go
away?

--Paul

Karl Anderson wrote:
> 
> Greenspun reviews _Designing Web Usability_.  I haven't read _DWU_ or
> even bothered with all of Greenspun's review, but it's worth noting
> that one of his first comments is something that zope.org fails at
> horribly, & is one of my pet peeves - most pages are unreadable unless
> you widen your browser to include most of the screen, and there's a
> big empty margin, too.
> 
> http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/nielsen/
> 
> Screen Space
> 
>      Computer enthusiasts in the late 1970s had personal computers
>      with bitmap video and two 20" monitors. Billions of dollars of
>      investment in the computer hardware industry has enabled computer
>      enthusiasts 20 years later to enjoy a faster CPU and ... two 21"
>      monitors. This lack of progress has resulted in universal
>      kvetching and bizarre fantasies of walls covered in 200 dpi LCD
>      displays or 3x2 arrays of monitors dominating a desktop.
> 
>      Nielsen holds screen space sacred. The cruelest thing that one
>      can do to a user is to waste his or her screen space. Nielsen
>      picks apart popular sites to show how small a percentage of the
>      screen is ultimately used for content. The rest is wasted on
>      browser and operating system controls, site navigation,
>      advertising, or whitespace that results from fixed-width HTML
>      designs that don't expand when the user expands the browser
>      window on a large-screen monitor.
> 
> --
> Karl Anderson                          karl@digicool.com
> 
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-- 

--Paul

Paul Everitt       Digital Creations
paul@digicool.com  540.371.6909
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