On Thu, 2005-12-29 at 11:12 +0100, Claus Schwarm wrote: > On Wed, 28 Dec 2005 17:36:22 -0600 > Shaun McCance <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > [snip] > > Sidebars that are common > > to most pages and sites should be on the right. > > > [snip] > > Just nitpicking: ;-) > > No, navigation sitebars should be on the left unless the page layout is > either constrained to under 800 pixels or the navigation is made > prominent with a visual clue (big, red letter or similar) or both. > > People from western societies have a top-left to bottom-right eye > movement habit, and they won't notice the navigation sidebar.
They will see it, unless the content is so wide that it pushes the sidebar completely off the screen. People do not look at the top-left pixel and work their way down. The eye looks at the page as a whole and will quickly recognize columnated data. Parenthical content such as navigation lists can be easily recognized, if properly formatted. The eye can then ignore it and read the real content, or scan it quickly when needed. Now, when you have sidebars on both sides, that screws up the brain. Because now I don't know which side to look on for non-content stuff. I can't scan them as quickly. The reason to put the sidebars on the right is that the left is the most prominent position (at least for LTR languages). With the exception of portal-style pages (which needn't use a document-oriented layout), people go to pages to read their content. Thus, the content should be in the most prominent position. Furthermore, when content occasionally gets wide, or when people have small screens, it's really annoying to have to scroll every page to the right just to be able to read the pages. -- Shaun _______________________________________________ gnome-web-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-web-list
