[Zope] Text won't Wrap on Zope site

[Cees de Groot]

[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>