6 ms·

My aggregation is the narrow paragraphs on most sites instead of flowing the entire width of the page. I assume this is so they can jam an advertisment inbetwee

My aggregation is the narrow paragraphs on most sites instead of flowing the entire width of the page. I assume this is so they can jam an advertisment inbetween every second sentence. There is plenty of space for scrollbars. Makes my large high dpi monitors almost pointless.

floren 2y ago
It's rather because your average person (maybe not your average HN reader) browses the web with a single window filling the entire screen. If paragraphs did not wrap, you could end up with lines 2 feet long which require you to turn your head from side to side as you read. An open newspaper may be 3 feet across but they put the text into narrow columns for a reason. If you want to jam in more ads, the real shithead trick is to split the story/article across multiple pages, so you get multiple page-loads per story.
al_borland 2y ago
Widescreen monitors, and people still using full screen with a widescreen monitors, are the issue there. Moving from Windows to OS X all those years back was what got me to move from having my applications in "windows" instead of "walls". OS X didn't really have a way to maximize stuff, just "zoom" to auto-size the window. Since I transitioned to my first widescreen monitor at the same time, this worked out really well. For a significant number of people, they don't get any benefit from a widescreen display, because all that extra space is just empty screen due to max-width being set on the text. Of course, if the developer didn't do that, the text would be hard to read. They're saving users from themselves in many cases. I have a site where I don't use any CSS and have a note to tell people to make their browser more narrow if they need the text to wrap so it's easier to read. Doing that, the site works on everything, no media queries required.

6 ms·

My aggregation is the narrow paragraphs on most sites instead of flowing the entire width of the page. I assume this is so they can jam an advertisment inbetwee

by hnburnsy 2y ago

floren 2y ago
It's rather because your average person (maybe not your average HN reader) browses the web with a single window filling the entire screen. If paragraphs did not wrap, you could end up with lines 2 feet long which require you to turn your head from side to side as you read. An open newspaper may be 3 feet across but they put the text into narrow columns for a reason. If you want to jam in more ads, the real shithead trick is to split the story/article across multiple pages, so you get multiple page-loads per story.
al_borland 2y ago
Widescreen monitors, and people still using full screen with a widescreen monitors, are the issue there. Moving from Windows to OS X all those years back was what got me to move from having my applications in "windows" instead of "walls". OS X didn't really have a way to maximize stuff, just "zoom" to auto-size the window. Since I transitioned to my first widescreen monitor at the same time, this worked out really well. For a significant number of people, they don't get any benefit from a widescreen display, because all that extra space is just empty screen due to max-width being set on the text. Of course, if the developer didn't do that, the text would be hard to read. They're saving users from themselves in many cases. I have a site where I don't use any CSS and have a note to tell people to make their browser more narrow if they need the text to wrap so it's easier to read. Doing that, the site works on everything, no media queries required.