Blog Control to Major Tom.

Try bring up this website and widening your browser window, and see what happens.

Are you surprised that nothing happens to the content? It drives me crazy that even though solutions to dynamically adjust content are available in just about any application (I was introduced to them over 15 years ago with Xawt) the browser content is so static.

If I have my browser windows as wide as my widescreen LCD goes, I want the content inside the window to span all that space. Is it too much to ask?

(2006-10-30 16:09:19.0) Comments [3] // Permalink

Comments:

Well, I don't think auto widening is always true. <p/> A text block has an optimal width which is most suitable for human eyes. That's why you see so many columns in a newspaper.

Posted by Max on October 30, 2006 at 06:04 PM PST #

Ah, Joe. You know it's not about what you want see, it's about what we want you to see. Do you know what dynamic width does to our lovingly crafted page designs, with all those clever dotted lines and perfectly balanced content segments? It screws it up, and designers don't like you screwing their designs up. We won't support your nice widescreen LCD, becasue we haven't got one ourselves yet :)

Posted by Tim Caynes on October 31, 2006 at 01:21 AM PST #

The only problem with the so-called "optimal" width, is that, at least on the netbeans.org site, the width does not scale with the text size. If you increase the text size, the width stays the same, further decreasing the readability. I guess netbeans is only for people with good eyesight.

Posted by Brian Utterback on October 31, 2006 at 06:27 AM PST #

30 Oct 2006