[ZO-Coll] [ZOC] 106/ 8 Comment "Too many pages are way too wide"

[Collector: NEW Zope.org (the ...]

Issue #106 Update (Comment) "Too many pages are way too wide"
 Status Pending, skin/bug medium
To followup, visit:
  http://collector.zope.org/ZopeOrg/106

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= Comment - Entry #8 by simon on Jul 8, 2004 5:50 pm

Plone 2 went with a table-based layout and addressed this problem in a different way::

 pre { overflow: auto; }

Adding this to the global stylesheet would be a good step towards making zope.org docs more readable. You can see it in action here at http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/FAQ at least in mozilla. Moz still often won't fit the page without scrolling - try with narrower window, larger font; other things forcing the width ? - but it's better.
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= Comment - Entry #7 by simon on Aug 17, 2003 3:24 pm

Tonico Strasser writes:
>Jean Jordaan wrote:
>> This also looks like an exemplary CSS layout:
>>    http://texturizer.net/firebird/extensions.html
>>
>> Sidebar and main content. The content even has a two-column
>> list that falls back to 1 column when I make my fonts large
>> enough.
>>
>> Further down, there are divs that extend beyond the window
>> to the right if my fonts are big, due to long URLs, but the
>> divs do so individually: each is only as wide as the URL
>> forces it to be. They're not all as wide as the widest.
>
> That are tables, and that's OK because they are used for structuring
> data. Divs wouldn't extend.

That's good news, and seems to be demonstrated by Jean's link.

A process issue: I think we should try to send such comments to the issue
itself, as well as the list. I've cc'd the above to
http://collector.zope.org/ZopeOrg/106 .


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= Comment - Entry #6 by simon on Aug 12, 2003 10:15 pm

Here is an example of a non-table page body that is free from the horizontal scrolling problem. 

http://zwiki.org/plone/WidePageTest
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= Comment - Entry #5 by simon on Aug 12, 2003 9:25 pm

PS and please overlook my tone of frustration with this old issue.
If I can help, eg by providing a sample skin that's better behaved, let me know.
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= Comment - Entry #4 by simon on Aug 12, 2003 9:10 pm

Oops. Members can't upload files. If I could have, I would have demonstrated the previous comment with a picture. 

Then I would have posted another picture, showing that with the fonts enlarged three times - to normal size - there is no way to read the valuable paper, except by scrolling left and right to read each line - ludicrous - or by visiting a secret url like http://www.zope.org/Members/klm/ZopeDebugging/ConversingWithZope/text . 

Note the original text is nicely-formatted structured text.. just a few long quoted lines, necessary to depict an interactive python session. It's the site's skin combined with current browser technology that has made this document unreadable. 

What this tells me is that the site skins need to change:
they need to forego using tables for the main body of the page.
In this case we're seeing ZWiki/skins/zwiki_plone/wikipage_view (or a customized version), but this applies to the default view in all skins. Being able to read documents is more important than having a sidebar. 
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= Comment - Entry #3 by simon on Aug 12, 2003 8:58 pm

Example: here is a valuable paper: http://www.zope.org/Members/klm/ZopeDebugging/ConversingWithZope

Here is a screenshot of a full-screen browser. Using the typical fonts at zope.org's default tiny size, it's just about possible to scroll so that the full page body is readable.
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= Comment - Entry #2 by simon on Aug 12, 2003 1:25 pm

Agreed. Would a div-based layout have the same problem ?

Otherwise, IMHO we should drop table-based layout (and the sidebar, presumably) for the main body of all pages, except the home page.
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= Request - Entry #1 by neaj on Aug 5, 2003 5:37 am

This has always bugged me about Plone too.
It seems like every second page is way wider than 
my browser window. This is partly the result of long
<pre> lines, which is made worse by the fact that
the content area is a table cell .. this means that 
the longest <pre> line sets the width of all the text.
It would be much better if only the too-long lines 
extended off the side of the screen, and the other 
lines wrapped. IMHO this consequence of the table-
based layout is a major downer :/

The table on a member's page (eg.
http://zope.org/Members/jens/view ) also gets much too
wide very easily. 

I like to bump up the text size to 120% or so for easy
reading on my laptop, and on new zope.org I can't, 
unless I want to scroll horizontally a lot.

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