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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   3702 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 7, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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How do people feel about white space in web design?

There has been this ongoing trend of massive amounts of white space, where it's basically a single sentence per screen. I find the experience awful on desktop. But only mildly annoying on mobile.

I'm also trying to find professional web design blogs or posts that point out how annoying this trend is. Instead all designers seem to have nothing but nice things to say about white space. Rather than making me think I'm wrong for going against all designers I instead just think the whole profession is wrong.

Everything should be horizontally expanded to fit its container at all times. Empty space is wasted space.

This is probably a symptom of the ongoing "app-ification" of webpages, whereby mobile and desktop layouts are merging increasingly to make less work for the designers and maintainers. The mass amounts of white space are usually there because that space doesn't exist on portrait mobile screens.

Everything should be horizontally expanded to fit its container at all times.

There are some legitimate concerns about readability and column width on widescreen monitors. The old school 80 column wide text terminal is a decent width, but a bit wider is fine too. That said, there are definitely designer-driven layouts that are way too narrow, but manually adjusting my browser window would be a PITA to do frequently.

Some width limit is reasonable, although maybe allowing sites to specify it might have been a poor design choice.

manually adjusting my browser window would be a PITA to do frequently.

I don't see how you would need to do it frequently. In the glorious world where every site fills your browser window, you would set your browser width once and then it would be correct for every site you visited.

The problem is that text isn't the only thing we view in a browser. When I view a video or just an image, I often - usually - want that taking up a lot of width. And it's not always a matter of just maximizing it, since I might want it to take up 70% of my monitor width rather than 100%, while I want 30% of my monitor width when reading. Ideally, I could just keep my browser at 70% width, and the text would take up 3/7 of the browser width when I read.

I personally think there should be some sort of default "text width" setting in browsers that force text to start wrapping if it goes beyond a certain width in terms of characters/percentage/pixels/units, much like how we can set a minimum font size in our browser.

Not really, no. For a multi-column design that has several chunks of content, I want them all at the same time filling my screen. For a single-column website like an article or a book, I prefer the text filling no more than 50% of my screen so that I do not forget where the beginning of the line was by the time I've gotten to the end of it.

I think you've missed part of the point, which is that in the ideal world we wouldn't have disparate setups like that. Every site would just be a single column, taking up the whole browser, and you size the browser accordingly (once).

But a single column is not always the best presentation.

I disagree with that. I think it is the best.

But if I want half-monitor-width columns of text, do I size my browser to half a screen (I've done this before)? When I want to view images, videos, or even tabular data (calendars, for example) though, I frequently want full-screen, widescreen presentation. The "multi-media" nature of web pages makes this difficult generally.

Although, I think the web would have developed very differently if the browser were allowed to specify maximum column width like it can text sizes or accessibility features. Not certain if that'd be better (light/dark theming is only now starting to work tolerably), but certainly different.

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