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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4823 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.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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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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