On Mon, 26 Mar 2012 12:55:42 -0400, PJ Eby <p...@telecommunity.com> wrote: > On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 8:41 PM, Ben Finney <ben+pyt...@benfinney.id.au>wrote: > > So, again, why make your browser window *for reading text* that large? > > Because I have one browser window, and it's maximized. And I can do this, > because most websites are designed in such a way that they have usable > margins for text flows. Even PEPs and Python mailing list archives, for > example, have sane text margins -- shall we go back and make *those* > dependent on window width instead? > [...] > > Designers' rules of thumb for text width are based on empirical > observations of focal length, saccades, etc. If you have special needs > visually, you're more likely to require the text read to you, than to have > narrower text, and I at least am unable to conceive of a visual disability > that would be helped by *increasing* the text width. > > In other words, there is a well-established *majority* need for how many > characters should appear in an unwrapped line of text, based on majority > physiology. Designers who limit it based on pixel size are Doing It Wrong; > the max width should be based on em's rather than pixels. (Font sizes are a > separate issue.)
I'm with Philip on this one. I hate web sites that have a fixed text width (so that you can't resize narrower and still read it), but I also prefer ones that set the max width to the "readable size" in number of character positions. Like Philip, I have *one* window. My window manager (ratpoison) is more like 'screen' for X: you *can* split the window up, but it is *much* more useful to have only one window visible at a time, most of the time. So splitting the window in order to make the text narrow enough to read slows down my workflow. (Which means that on the python docs and the bug tracker I just put up with reading it wide...) I realize that I'm in the minority, though :) --David _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
