jswolf said:
> But as we know, ebooks should be about reflowable text
> in such a way that it gives the user the experience s/he wants.
yeah, you know, i've agreed with that perspective for decades.
and yet, in the last 15 years, the one format that caught on
-- stole the whole show, basically -- was frozen-page .pdf...
and according to every multi-format web-library i know,
it's _still_ the runaway leader in downloads. go figure...
i guess i wasn't quite as smart as i once thought i was...
> Would you really enjoy using your computer
> when 2/3rds on the right blank?
i have a 23-inch cinema-screen, so i often work in
windows 1/3 the size of this baby. so maybe i'm the
wrong person for you to be asking that question to...
if you want my posts to fill the width of your screen,
however, then you could just jack the text-size up...
i can even make it fill the width of my 23-inch screen:
but, yeah, one thing i've noticed is more and more sites
insist on limiting the column-width of the user-experience.
blogs default to put the main content in a center column
-- which generally takes up roughly _half_ of the screen --
and relegate sidebar stuff to the left and right columns.
i think they do this because browsing at full-screen width
makes lines much too long to be easily readable. at least
that's why i _assume_ they're doing it. but like i just said,
i'm not quite as smart as i once thought i was about this,
so maybe you should ask them why they're doing it...
you can start with david rothman, over at the teleread blog.
up until just recently, he had a very narrow center column.
and it was set at a fixed specified size, so even when i would
widen my window to the full 23 inches, the center column
still stayed at that puny width. for such a champion of the
"power" of the xhtml/css combo, it was funny and ironic.
he's got a new design now that turned me off even more,
so i haven't browsed there much lately, i read it in r.s.s.,
so i can't really tell you what the current problems are...
but hey, here's a screenshot to show you what it looks like
here on _my_ monitor:
and then there's that khoi guy, who is considered one of the
best web-designers, which is why the n.y. times hired him.
he likes grids, and some columns on his personal website
are so narrow that even my _smallest_ lines spill over...
here's what his site -- subtraction.com -- looks like for me:
or john gruber. again, narrow center column, with whitespace
(or should i say "grayspace"?) at left and right. wasted space,
in my personal opinion, but hey, whatsa person gonna do?
and gruber is reputed to have some great design chops too.
i think i remember he said it took him _6_months_ to make
the final decision on the _exact_ color of his gray background.
so now we know why the designers get the big bucks, eh?
and don't forget the mecca of c.s.s., the c.s.s. zen garden.
i entertain myself frequently there by zooming the text up to
a really _huge_ pointsize -- i'm talking like 64 points and up --
to see how it breaks all those nicely-crafted designs to pieces.
not that you have to go so big to break the designs, mind you.
on many designs, if you size up the text _one_measly _notch_,
the design breaks. and _two_notches_ usually breaks it badly.
plus gee, now we have the small screens like the iphone,
actually displaying websites "the way they were intended"
-- as opposed to the "make-it-narrow" approach of opera --
so we have to include _that_ in the picture as well...
it's complicated, i tell you. i used to think it was _easy_,
and _reflow_ was the solution that solved all the problems.
but now i can see that even a ruthless reflow-minded
approach like the xhtml/css combo can't handle everything.
so now it's just plain hard to say...
-bowerbird
p.s. somehow, however, i don't think that you intended
to bring up a general theoretical question about reflowing,
did you? so let me give you a tip that you might like.
this edit-field here, where people enter and edit posts?
it's very narrow. if you were to make it _a_lot_wider_,
then you would probably find that my lines got longer...
i'm not the boss of you, and i'm not telling you what to do,
i'm just sayin'...
