First post, by 133MHz
- Rank
- Oldbie
A post by Great Hierophant on this thread made me think about something I've started to notice recently.
wrote:The old Mobygames site would use as much width as your screen could provide. A few sites like Wikipedia still do, but most sites today stick their content squarely in the middle of the page. I am not saying that this approach is not without merit. Tablets benefit from this approach, but also multiple window users also enjoy the benefit. However, the wikipedia adaptive-width approach is the best in my opinion. One can use the left and right sides of the screen without making the site seem cluttered.
On my 22" 1080p display I have my browser window open to one side, resized to give an effective page area of roughly 1000x800 pixels, using the free space on the right for gadgets, notes, IM windows, etc (things I used a second monitor for a couple years ago). Like this:
But when friends come over and use my PC to have a quick look at something the very first thing they do is maximize the browser window. I don't get it. It either wastes a ton of space on the sides or the text expands to fill the screen, leading to ridiculously long lines. I can't read like that, I feel like I'm moving my head too much to read a single line of text, which makes me lose focus way faster and is much more tiring overall. Have I been living under a rock? Is this how everyone is reading text nowadays?
One thing I like about widescreen displays though is two page scrolling on PDFs - reading manuals and schematic diagrams like that is so much better, but for web pages I'm sticking to a 4:3ish ratio.
