[Zope] Re: Line Wrap and the Zope Community?

Simon Michael simon@joyful.com
Wed, 21 Nov 2001 12:06:28 -0800


Ron <theotiwii@earthlink.net> writes:
> I swear, kids designing pages in HTML editors are producing more
> appealing results! 

Whoops! Your rant broke loose :)

Don't forget it's easy to produce one pretty page, a lot harder to
ensure optimal display of all pages under all conditions.

Just a few more datapoints on
http://www.zope.org/Documentation/ZDG/ComponentsAndInterfaces.stx - I
confirm that in a "standard"-width browser window - that is, about 2/3
of my XGA screen - NS 4.7 requires scrolling and mozilla 0.9.5 does.
Konqueror 2.2 doesn't, cleverly enough.

"Chris McDonough" <chrism@zope.com> writes:
> Note that lots of pages on Zope.org make the presumption that you're
> browsing at a screen resolution of 1024 x 768 or higher.  It's

I think that's almost never a reasonable presumption, alas.

In the case of lines wider than the window, which can't be wrapped for
whatever reason, I think it's perfectly reasonable for them to go
off-screen and require horizontal scrolling. However, what frequently
happens is that the entire page happily fills the new width and so now
*every* line requires scrolling. This is what's particularly annoying,
when you have to scroll to see things that you know your browser is
perfectly capable of wrapping.

I think this is mostly when the text is within a table layout. Most
zope.org pages use a table layout and are vulnerable for this reason.
I'm guessing slightly here.

An easy solution is to not put the main page text in a table. This
would mean giving up the left sidebar, typically putting menus & links
along the top instead. This would also help the width shortage as well
as improve page rendering speed; I think many sites have made this
move for the same reasons. And as readers of this list over the last
few years know, I wouldn't miss the zope.org Blue Zone too much.

-Simon