[Systems] wiki design

[Josh Williams]

On 3/13/10 8:00 PM, Bernie Innocenti wrote:
> On Sat, 2010-03-13 at 13:36 -0700, Josh Williams wrote:
>    
>> That's true, you can always resize the window. I'm in the camp that it's
>> better to set a maximum width because I think it's harder to read long
>> strings of text. Also I don't enjoy resizing the window just for sites
>> that do this. Anyway, I'm not opposed to having it set at 100% width if
>> you think most of the wiki users would prefer that.
>>      
> I was convinced of the superiority of a resizable layou until reading
> your argument. Indeed, very long lines of text are hard to read and look
> bad.
>
> On the other hand, even on my 1440 pixel wide-screen display, our
> production wiki looks normal, while yours seems too narrow.
>
> It might be because I'm using larger fonts, and you specified the width
> in pixels. Perhaps you could use point units instead?
>    

Take a look now, I set the max width to 65em (which is the rough 
equivelent of what I had it at before). An em is a unit of measurement 
that's based off the current text size so it scales when you increase 
the font size.
> While I agree with you on the principle, it might turn out to be too
> hard to get the fixed layout look good on all of the oddly shaped
> displays that exist today. The official Wikipedia site also uses 100%
> width, perhaps for the same reason.
>    

If we can't make it look good then we should just go without setting a 
maximum width.
>
>    
>> I personally use wine for ie6 and then I have an xp virtual machine for
>> ie 7, vista VM for ie 8, and an old ubuntu VM for FF3. I use my
>> girlfriends old ibook for safari 3.
>>      
> Wow, that's quite an impressive range... You missed my favorite, but
> Safari should come close.
>    

Before reading further (or remembering your screenshot) I thought your 
favorite was Konqueror :) . I actually use chromium dev builds for my 
daily browsing, but I don't test the windows version unless I'm 
embedding fonts and I don't test the linux version at all.
>> Thanks the screenshot was helpful, I'll be working on the issue later
>> next week. BTW if you normally have that many tabs open, I strongly
>> recommend you try out tree style tabs for firefox - it's a super handy
>> ad on.
>>      
> Thank you, it's really fantastic... but it won't suffice: I'm too happy
> with Chromium to switch back to Firefox as my default browser :-)
>
>    
Chrome is nice I can't really argue with you there.

Josh