[Web4lib] Nielsen's Top 10 - 2005 version

[Mike Taylor]

> Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2005 11:27:45 -0700
> From: "Mark Bardsley" <bardsley at u.washington.edu>
> 
> I recently redesigned a website and it looked bad on a high res
> screen with a width of 1600 pixels because a paragraph looked like
> one long stretched sentence. My solution was to put a maximum width
> on the divs containing the content and navigation bar.

This is good -- what you're implementing here is not a _fixed_ width
(which is an evil thing) but a _maximum_ width (which is helpful to
stop lines of text getting too long for comfortable reading).

I hate hate HATE fixed-width layouts.  It is absolutely not a writer's
job to dictate to me how big my window has to be.  As a matter of
course, I spend most of my days with a text-editor and a web-browser
side-by-side on my screen.  On a 1280-pixel-wide screen, that is still
just about possible for many sites; on my 1024-pixel laptop, it's
not.  And I hate that.

> Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2005 13:51:03 -0700
> From: "Mark Bardsley" <bardsley at u.washington.edu>
> 
> I think there is potential for blame to be placed on web
> technologies (those new fangled things are out of control). Of
> course you don't have many of the options we are talking about (font
> size increase, etc.) with books without reprinting them in a larger
> font.

Books _have_ to have their design fixed by their creators, because
they are concrete physical objects.  One of the many wonderful things
that computers bring to the party is separation of content and
presentation, so that the reader can choose how the content should
look (window size, font size, etc.)  It is a horrible mistake to
impose the limitations of an old medium on a new one.

[Apologies if I am coming over as rather dogmatic here.  That's
because, er, I _am_ rather dogmatic!]

 _/|_	 ___________________________________________________________________
/o ) \/  Mike Taylor  <mike at miketaylor.org.uk>  http://www.miketaylor.org.uk
)_v__/\  "Artists would like to ignore the business side: to some extent
	 you can, and to another extent you can't" -- Alvin Sylvain.