[Web4lib] Nielsen's Top 10 - 2005 version

[Erik Kraft]

Thomas Dowling wrote:

>Erik Kraft wrote:
>
>  
>
>>In my original post, I was arguing that it's important, for the sake of
>>readability, to be able to control line widths and white space on a
>>page.
>>    
>>
>
>
>Erik is right about readability.  The problem is that the vast majority
>of web pages that attempt to enforce width restrictions are created by
>people who don't think in terms of readability and typographical
>concepts like "line length", and couldn't tell you a reasonable way to
>measure that length.  As a result, that vast majority really does cause
>immense annoyance for anyone whose display environment is not a close
>match to the designer's, and the line length (measured in characters per
>line) ends up being anywhere from half as wide to twice as wide as the
>designer thought he specified.  Readability goes out the door.
>  
>
Fair enough--I agree that a well-meaning but 
not-typographically-informed designer is liable to cause more annoyance 
than good. I'm probably a slightly weird librarian in that my idea of 
fun weekend reading lately has been books like Bringhurst's Elements of 
Typographic Style and Spiekermann's Stop Stealing Sheep..., but this is 
a relatively recent enthusiasm for me, and I wouldn't want anyone with a 
keen typographic eye to look at pages I worked on a year ago.

>Referring back to Nielsen's column, the specific problems his users
>identified with fixed page widths were:
>
>  * On big monitors, websites are difficult to use if they don't
>    resize with the window. Conversely, if users have a small
>    window and a page doesn't use a liquid layout, it triggers
>    insufferable horizontal scrolling.
>
>  * The rightmost part of a page is cut off when printing a frozen
>    page. This is especially true for Europeans, who use narrower
>    paper (A4) than Americans.
>
>
>I don't think you can deny those are problems with typical fixed-width
>pages.  Solve those problems, and you're free to manage line length
>issues as you see fit.
>  
>
Well, the second issue is easily solvable with an alternate style sheet 
for print media. As for the first, I suppose this is the whole crux of 
the argument (excepting the horizontal-scrollbars-at-low-resolution, 
which I agree are diabolical), so we might need to agree to disagree 
here. I will say, though, that the thing that initially got my hackles 
up about this piece was Nielsen's assertion that "on big monitors, 
websites are difficult to use if they don't resize with the window." 
Difficult how, exactly? I'm currently working on a 19" LCD monitor at 
1280 x 1024 resolution. If I visit the Yale Library website 
<http://www.library.yale.edu/> (which happens to be my favorite library 
site design, and one that employs a fixed width layout) in a maximized 
browser window, it doesn't suddenly become "difficult to use" because 
it's not filling up my screen. Where it *might* become difficult to use 
is if the content flowed laterally to fill the width of my browser 
window and the spatial relationships between objects on the page, which 
the designers clearly put a lot of thought into, were lost.

I'm sure everyone's good and sick of me clogging their inboxes by now, 
so I'll bugger off now. :) Have a good weekend, all.

Cheers,

Erik.