4 ms·

Multi-column text on a desktop? Stop. Now. Please.. I's sad to see that more and more websites are phones/tablets orientated and are often hardly usable on a de

by kbart 12y ago

Multi-column text on a desktop? Stop. Now. Please.. I's sad to see that more and more websites are phones/tablets orientated and are often hardly usable on a desktop PC. I'm not against a uniformity of the web pages across various devices, but I'm yet to see an acceptable, mature solution.

haakon-wium-lie 12y ago
Check out Wikipedia, they use multi-column layout nicely for their references.
- jmreid 12y ago
  For the section that isn't actual body copy and isn't for reading as one article? That's not a good example of where multi-column works "nicely".
  - haakon-wium-lie 12y ago
    It's a way of using multicol to save screenspace. For Wikipedia references, this works well even in scrolled environments. It would not work so well for body text du to columns then being longer than the height of the screen. For longer articles, pagination is required.
rostigerpudel 12y ago
My screen - like probably a significant portion of screens out there - is wide, 16:10 or 16:9. So without multi-column layout, I have three layout possibilities: Long lines (hard to read), large font (wasting screen real estate) or some form of fixed-width central column with auto margin (also wasting real estate). With multi-column text layout I (think I) read faster. It is much easier for me to remember where on the screen a certain passage was in case I have the desire to re-read at a later point in the text (say, because I am not sure if I understood correctly). Plus, for long texts it is much easier to jump to an earlier part of the text when it is still visible than to scroll back. So I wouldn't flat-out refuse that Good may come of this. I don't see the application of multi-column text on a phone screen given its size but tablets seem to have reached sufficient size and resolution. Multi-column text still breaks the way I usually read on the web, but I feel it might be worth getting used to.

by kbart 12y ago

haakon-wium-lie 12y ago

Check out Wikipedia, they use multi-column layout nicely for their references.

jmreid 12y ago
For the section that isn't actual body copy and isn't for reading as one article? That's not a good example of where multi-column works "nicely".
- haakon-wium-lie 12y ago
  It's a way of using multicol to save screenspace. For Wikipedia references, this works well even in scrolled environments. It would not work so well for body text du to columns then being longer than the height of the screen. For longer articles, pagination is required.

rostigerpudel 12y ago

My screen - like probably a significant portion of screens out there - is wide, 16:10 or 16:9. So without multi-column layout, I have three layout possibilities: Long lines (hard to read), large font (wasting screen real estate) or some form of fixed-width central column with auto margin (also wasting real estate). With multi-column text layout I (think I) read faster. It is much easier for me to remember where on the screen a certain passage was in case I have the desire to re-read at a later point in the text (say, because I am not sure if I understood correctly). Plus, for long texts it is much easier to jump to an earlier part of the text when it is still visible than to scroll back. So I wouldn't flat-out refuse that Good may come of this. I don't see the application of multi-column text on a phone screen given its size but tablets seem to have reached sufficient size and resolution. Multi-column text still breaks the way I usually read on the web, but I feel it might be worth getting used to.