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Many sites seem designed for two kinds of devices: huge 29" screens, or small 5" screens. If you use a "normal" laptop things often look less than great. It's n

Many sites seem designed for two kinds of devices: huge 29" screens, or small 5" screens. If you use a "normal" laptop things often look less than great. It's not uncommon for some fixed header or whatnot to take up a quarter or even a third of the total screen, especially if you like to zoom text a wee bit.

vladvasiliu 5y ago
> Many sites seem designed for two kinds of devices: huge 29" screens, or small 5" screens. I don't know about the 5" screens since I rarely browse the web on my phone, but it's pretty clear to me that most sites are not designed for huge screens. I have a 4K 32" screen, and I've lost count of the number of sites that will expand to take up all the available width and show absurdly long lines of text. And since I'm using a tiling window manager, the window is basically full-screen. One such example: TFA.
- flobosg 5y ago
  If it is a website I frequent I usually add a custom CSS stylesheet that limits the linewidth to a reasonable length.
  - The_rationalist 5y ago
- hericium 5y ago
  > And since I'm using a tiling window manager, the window is basically full-screen. Tiling wm works well for me with tall/narrow browser windows utilizing the "phone view". I rarely have full-screen browser window, it's more often 1/4 to 2/3 screen width.
- StillBored 5y ago
  The problem here is twofold. The first is that css still makes it really hard (AFAIK) to do multi-column text flowing (aka newspaper style). The second is of course using the tiling window manager, I expect that a web page uses the entire browser canvas area its presented with (aka its not putting in 16" margins around a 2" wide bit of text, as is the other common failure). So, I'm fine with the entire web page becoming a single line of text if I give it a 8k pixel wide/40" screen. I will resize it to something more appropriate if that is its problem. edit: Well I would delete this comment, because it looks like its a fixed problem, I guess not doing css for the past 4 years, i'm a bit out of the loop. http://xahlee.info/js/css_multi-column_layout.html http://xahlee.info/js/css_multi-column_layout.html Although its still not 100% reasonable (if i'm understanding), there should be a way to instead of specifing the column counts rather specify roughly the column attributes and have the browser determine the column count and flow the text. You would think `column-count: auto` would do that but at least on ff, that just means `column-count: 1`
  - vladvasiliu 5y ago
    I wasn't even thinking about doing dynamic multi-column layouts. But just put some sort of maximum width. Sure, there's going to be a ton of empty space, but that's less of a hassle. At least the text is easy to read.
    - StillBored 5y ago
      Well that is just a large (if not larger problem). Where should one set the limit, I despise web pages that are just a long pencil line down the middle of my screen where 90% of the realestate is wasted as much as you despise the ones that paint the entire thing in one giant wall of unbroken text. Hence my comment about the solution being multi-column newspaper flow. Your average newspaper still probably fits 50x the information density on a two page layout than my computer is doing with three high resolution monitors. Although, part two of this are the really irritating web pages that refuse to vertically scroll more than 50-100 items because it breaks their pagination. Yielding a case where I'm "shopping" (looking at logs/whatever) and the items are only filling the top 1/3 of my monitor. Part three are the applications that scroll but can't accurately reflect where in the wall of text one is actually at (think slack/etc).

vladvasiliu 5y ago

> Many sites seem designed for two kinds of devices: huge 29" screens, or small 5" screens. I don't know about the 5" screens since I rarely browse the web on my phone, but it's pretty clear to me that most sites are not designed for huge screens. I have a 4K 32" screen, and I've lost count of the number of sites that will expand to take up all the available width and show absurdly long lines of text. And since I'm using a tiling window manager, the window is basically full-screen. One such example: TFA.

flobosg 5y ago
If it is a website I frequent I usually add a custom CSS stylesheet that limits the linewidth to a reasonable length.
- The_rationalist 5y ago
hericium 5y ago
> And since I'm using a tiling window manager, the window is basically full-screen. Tiling wm works well for me with tall/narrow browser windows utilizing the "phone view". I rarely have full-screen browser window, it's more often 1/4 to 2/3 screen width.
StillBored 5y ago
The problem here is twofold. The first is that css still makes it really hard (AFAIK) to do multi-column text flowing (aka newspaper style). The second is of course using the tiling window manager, I expect that a web page uses the entire browser canvas area its presented with (aka its not putting in 16" margins around a 2" wide bit of text, as is the other common failure). So, I'm fine with the entire web page becoming a single line of text if I give it a 8k pixel wide/40" screen. I will resize it to something more appropriate if that is its problem. edit: Well I would delete this comment, because it looks like its a fixed problem, I guess not doing css for the past 4 years, i'm a bit out of the loop. http://xahlee.info/js/css_multi-column_layout.html http://xahlee.info/js/css_multi-column_layout.html Although its still not 100% reasonable (if i'm understanding), there should be a way to instead of specifing the column counts rather specify roughly the column attributes and have the browser determine the column count and flow the text. You would think `column-count: auto` would do that but at least on ff, that just means `column-count: 1`
- vladvasiliu 5y ago
  I wasn't even thinking about doing dynamic multi-column layouts. But just put some sort of maximum width. Sure, there's going to be a ton of empty space, but that's less of a hassle. At least the text is easy to read.
  - StillBored 5y ago
    Well that is just a large (if not larger problem). Where should one set the limit, I despise web pages that are just a long pencil line down the middle of my screen where 90% of the realestate is wasted as much as you despise the ones that paint the entire thing in one giant wall of unbroken text. Hence my comment about the solution being multi-column newspaper flow. Your average newspaper still probably fits 50x the information density on a two page layout than my computer is doing with three high resolution monitors. Although, part two of this are the really irritating web pages that refuse to vertically scroll more than 50-100 items because it breaks their pagination. Yielding a case where I'm "shopping" (looking at logs/whatever) and the items are only filling the top 1/3 of my monitor. Part three are the applications that scroll but can't accurately reflect where in the wall of text one is actually at (think slack/etc).